The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.

Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide

Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

Diversity is not a virtue. Diversity is a good only to the extent that it advances other virtues, justice or inclusiveness of others who have previously been excluded.

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.

You’ve got a good side?”“I do. I just don’t use it too often. My bad side’s so much more fun.

There is no tube of paint that says, 'Don't know.' I have to come to grips with it.

Sometimes you just have the thin the herd.

I think that people get to a certain point in their life and they think that nothing can change.

Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.

Father-daughter relationship, is something that I think is so unique and it can't really be explained unless you have a daughter.

I'm the type of person, I have to study to get an A on the test.

Bangkok, like Las Vegas, sounds like a place where you make bad decisions.

Sacrificing the earth for paradise is giving up the substance for the shadow.

All things that come into being and grow are earth and water.