Trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up?

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.

If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

Your wrinkles either show that you're nasty, cranky, and senile, or that you're always smiling.

Die on a hilltop... eyeing the crows... waiting for your lids to close... but you want to watch as they peck your flesh... Ironic that they go for the eyes first.

There's no reason for unhappiness if you're living with nice design.

The way I look at it, movies are a different medium for storytelling than books.

True holiness is not achieved by what we do, but what we allow God to do in us.

As actors you're always going to take certain roles that are in your comfort zone and take ones that aren't.

I've been on a show before where I was on a billboard and then, after like three or four weeks, they took the billboard down and replaced it with nothing. Took my face down and put a white board up.

People ask how I learned to play bass with one hand. Well, with a face like mine, you learn to do a lot of things with one hand.

Somewhere the sense makes copper roses steel roses — The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end — of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits.