Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Morality binds and blinds.
Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence.
The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.
Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.
Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.
The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.
Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.
Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.
Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.
science is a smorgasbord, and google will guide you to the study that's right for you.
Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves.
Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.
Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.
Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything.
Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service.
Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.
Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams... but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.
Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide
If you have high IQ, you're really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness.
The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.
We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.
If you get something for nothing, part of you may be pleased, but part of you moves your hand to give something back.
I got interested in the American culture war back in 2004, and it's one of the only growth stocks I've ever invested in.
Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.
Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.
If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated - everyone except for psychopaths.
The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It’s really precious, and it’s really easy to lose.
The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose.
The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.
It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.
By temperament and disposition and emotions, I'm a liberal; but in my beliefs about what's best for the country, I'm a centrist.
Religious experiences are real and common, whether or not God exists, and these experiences often make people whole and at peace.
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.
People are wrong when they say that everything should be more diverse, even, say, rock bands. It's an error, an overgeneralization.
Democrats talk about programs like Social Security or Medicare, but it's not clear to most voters what Democrats' core moral values are.
People are voting for the kind of country they want to live in, and there are different views about what kind of country we should have.
Anytime we're interacting with someone, we're judging them, we're sharing expectations, we think they didn't live up to those expectations.
I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement.
The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.
[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.
Liberals and conservatives are opponents in the most literal sense, each using the myth of pure evil to demonize the other side and unite there own.
Politics is really religion. Politics is about sacredness. Politics is about offering a vision that will bind the nation together to pursue greatness.
People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.
Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.
Trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up?