We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.

the mind is a neural computer

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science.

A bumper sticker from the 1970s read, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.

Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.

The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.

A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others.

The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt..., " but "If ... then ... else.

Being negative only makes a difficult journey more difficult. You may be given a cactus, but you don't have to sit on it.

Deep downy upholstery is absolutely what I've always been about.

Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal.

Out of my discomforts, which were small enough, grew one thing for which I have all my life been grateful, the formation of fixed habits of work.

You never know why something works or doesn't.

It's thrilling. There's birth and death and frustration and victory in raising horses. It's like a little microcosm of life is built into the short lives of these creatures.

We're all in different scenarios, we all make mistakes, we all break stuff, but we're not perfect, we couldn't [be] - it doesn't matter what you build.

Of course, everyone knows my story of being born in Russia and moving to the United States at 7. For a few years people would say, 'Well, she's living in the United States, but she's Russian.'

Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.

The world is full of people who would like nothing better than to spend six hours on a golf course. I would rather be chopping shallots.