You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.

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.

No one can tell the difference between a clone and a human. That's because there isn't any difference. The idea of clones being inferior is a filthy lie.

When you shift conversations and explore the greatness of your team members, you're likely to be a person who creates opportunities for their strength to show up on the job.

The only thing wealth does for some people is to make them worry about losing it.

Although the masters make the rules for the wise men and the fools, I've got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

A devastating commentary on the war in Iraq is that we have been unable to spend money on infrastructure.

Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.

The Bible, itself the ultimate curse, is an in-depth profile of the divine spleen.

I wished that I were the owner of every southern slave, that I might cast off the shackles from their limbs, and witness the rapture which would excite them in the first dance of their freedom.

Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition, and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors.