We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.

The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you — the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends.

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.

The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.

The Public provides freedom...Individualism begins after the roads are built, after individualists have had an education, after medical research has cured their diseases.

Most conservatives are conservatives because they think they are morally correct.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.

For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.

One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures.

I am hope.

This is how social change ultimately happens: enlightened values do not change behavior

There is a passion for perfection which you rarely see fully developed but you may note this fact that in successful lives it is never wholly lacking.

We're not going to meddle in the internal life of other peoples and other governments, because we don't want them meddling in ours.

We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy. Yet we import more oil today than ever before.

You don't need to be right all the time. Your child wants a man for a father, not a formula. He wants real parents, real people, capable of making mistakes without moping about it.

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.

If you're going to think mean things about me or not be a true friend, then we don't need to be friends.

Calvin [Trillin] was much more of a mover and a shaker. That's all I'm saying. I was a "weenie." That was another term back then.

Age, I do abhor thee, youth, I do adore thee.