The Enlightenment dream is a good one. The idea that people should rationally appreciate their place in nature, assess threats and possibilities, and regulate their behavior in response is inspiring.

In this era of globalization we are witnessing struggles within individual states about what their identity and interests consist in.

We live on a restless planet in a violent universe.

Apocalypses don't happen very often. They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before.

Moral revolutions are typically seen retrospectively. Prospectively, the revolutionaries tend to look like crazy people, and sometimes they are.

I take seriously the idea that we are African Apes who (at least for the moment) dominate the planet, but our psychology is pretty much what it was when we were living in small groups on the savanna.

One of the real dangers of our time is people's indifference to history.

Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.

I'm a subjectivist about morality.

Ethics is prescriptive and can change behavior, but usually only at the margins.

Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

I had learned that you should always shout louder than your aggressor.

The man who does ill, ill must suffer too.

Since I spend such a long time making each book, I only choose books that I'm really interested in and that I really love.

It's the Kalkara. they're hunting.

Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.

A lot of people call me the architect of rock & roll. I don't call myself that, but I believe it's true.

Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers because there is always a receptive audience.

I don't want to impose on anyone else and make anyone else emotional or anything. I tend to quietly cry, kind of turn away.

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.