The problem is that the Enlightenment dream may make too many demands on poor African apes like us. We may just not be up to it.

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.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures

Nothing makes us so beautiful as our smiles.

Iraq will not allow any action on its soil that could harm the U.S. We don't want any action from our soil to target our neighbors.

Only about 2 percent of people can work entirely without supervision. We call those people 'leaders'. This is the kind of person you are meant to be and that you can be, if you decide to be.

The world is Trouble...and Grace. That is all there is.

Liars seldom believe anyone else.

People are hard to govern. The rulers interfere with too much. That is why people are hard to govern.

I think the greatest gift we can give our children is to show them that devotion to God's purposes - love for all beings - is the center of all right living.

I've reached the moment where the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.

Increasing recycling in Delaware is an idea whose time has come and, if put off, may not come again.