"Of course genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life."

"As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal."

"The whole point of international terrorism is to shock the world with the most horrific spectacle imaginable."

"Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point."

"Many people implicitly believe in the Hydraulic Theory of Violence: that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression (a death instinct or thirst for blood), which builds up inside us and must periodically be discharged. Nothing could be further from a contemporary scientific understanding of the psychology of violence. Aggression is not a single motive, let alone a mounting urge. It is the output of several psychological systems that differ in their environmental triggers, their internal logic, their neurobiological basis, and their social distribution."

"I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology-that progress comes through class struggle, often violent. It led to the widespread belief that the only way to achieve justice was to hurry this dialectical process along, and allow the oppressed working classes to carry out their struggle against their bourgeois oppressors."

"Religious people today, compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality while getting their actual morality from more modern principles."

"Dear White Fella When I am born I'm black When I grow up I'm black When I am sick I'm black When I go out ina sun I'm black When I git cold I'm black When I git scared I'm black And when I die I'm still black. But you white fella When you're born you're pink When you grow up you're white When you git sick you're green When you go out ina sun you go red When you git cold you go blue When you git scared you're yellow And when you die you're grey And you got the cheek to call me coloured?"

"Legal investigation. As Clinton noted, "My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful."

"But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo."

"Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruency"-the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why?"

"No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn."

"The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer."

"Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics."

"If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important."

"Reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking, it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact."

"Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs."

"Can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in conflict and strife. Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste?"

"The mind is a neural computer."

"The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud."

"As an Auyana man living in New Guinea under the Pax Australiana put it, "Life was better since the government came because "a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot."

"People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It’s hard to follow the news without feeling a mounting dread of terrorist attacks, a clash of civilizations, and the use of weapons of mass destruction. But we often forget the dangers that filled the news a few decades ago and become blasé about the good fortune that so many of them have fizzled out."

"Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek - why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish."

"Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature."

"The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd."

"The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned."

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it."

"I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture."

"In hermetic isolation, all kinds of bizarre and toxic ideas can fester. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and exposing a bad idea to the critical glare of other minds provides at least a chance that it will wither and die."

"Behavioral science is not for sissies."

"The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution."

"Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with."

"Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface."

"As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty."

"If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives: clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless, unmarred and unsullied."

"Cademics and intellectuals are culture vultures. In a gathering of today's elite, it is perfectly acceptable to laugh that you barely passed Physics for Poets and Rocks for Jocks and have remained ignorant of science ever since, despite the obvious importance of scientific literacy to informed choices about personal health and public policy. But saying that you have never heard of James Joyce or that you tried listening to Mozart once but prefer Andrew Lloyd Webber is as shocking as blowing your nose on your sleeve or announcing that you employ children in your sweatshop, despite the obvious unimportance of your tastes in leisure-time activity to just about anything."

"I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis."

"The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions."

"Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights."

"Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train travel? You suffer from siderodromophobia. Having misgivings about your mother-in-law is pentheraphobia, and being petrified of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth is arachibutyrophobia. And then there's Franklin Delano Roosevelt's affliction, the fear of fear itself, or phobophobia."

"Much can be gained be contrasting a theory with its alternatives, even ones that look too extreme to be true. You can really understand something when you know what it is not."

"So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one's chances of being a victim of violence fivefold."

"Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved."

"People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections."

"In allowing the crucifixion to take place, God did the world an incalculable favor. Though infinitely powerful, compassionate, and wise, he could think of no other way to reprieve humanity from punishment for its sins (in particular, for the sin of being descended from a couple who had disobeyed him) than to allow an innocent man (his son no less) to be impaled through the limbs and slowly suffocate in agony. By acknowledging that this sadistic murder was a gift of divine mercy, people could earn eternal life. And if they failed to see the logic in all this, their flesh would be seared by fire for all eternity."

"Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words."

"States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one."

"They are distinct enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered system we call a human being."

"The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment."

"Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination."