We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think.

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.

That is why we fight - in hopes of a day when we no longer need to.

The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day

You shouldn't do things differently just because they're different. They need to be... better.

The idea of not getting a gun is not because I'm afraid of guns, it's not because I think guns are wrong, it's because it's impractical, it's stupid and it's exactly what they want me to do.

Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people.

We have always pretensions to fame which, in our own hearts, we know to be disputable.

Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.

And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?