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" 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. "

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" Even if you have a brain predisposed to liberalism, you might end up with some conservative friends or find inspiring conservative role models who could be very influential on you, and that could send you down a different track in life. "

" 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. "

" Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams... but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality. "

" Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world. "

" Liberals tend to be much more concerned about business and corporations as the oppressors. They look to government as the solution. On the Right it's the opposite. They see business as good, as what generates wealth in society, and they see government as the oppressor, which makes it hard for especially small businesspeople. "

" 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? "

" If you have high IQ, you're really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness. "

" There's an enormous difference between voting for a candidate because you hate another ethnic group and voting for a candidate because he's a member of your ethnic group. "

" The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose. "

" In accounts of men in battle, there is an incredible adrenaline rush from group-versus-group conflict. The fervor and passion of partisans is clearly rewarding; and if it's rewarding, it involves dopamine; and if it involves dopamine, then it is potentially addictive. "

" The most important thing to realize is we're not blank slates at birth. We don't start off with nothing in our heads, and then get imprinted entirely by our environment. There's something in our heads on the day we're born, and then we grow up and make choices. "

" Dividing into teams doesn't necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility. "

" People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe. "

" 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. "

" Anytime we're interacting with someone, we're judging them, we're sharing expectations, we think they didn't live up to those expectations. "

" The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction. "

" Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues. "

" My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life? "

" It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience.' People who are high on openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable. "

" When I began my work on how morality varies across the political spectrum, there was a partisan, manipulative element to it. I wanted to help the Democrats win. "

" Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams. "

" The big breakthrough for me was, once I stopped disliking conservatives and could actually see what they were right about, they showed me a lot of things that liberals were wrong about. But at the same time, I think there are some things that liberals are right about that conservatives have trouble seeing. "

" When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That's what you should expect. "

" Social conservatives are very focused on strengthening the family, and I think they are right to do so. One of the worst blind spots of the Left has been its reluctance to say that marriage matters for children. "

" Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree. "

" Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves. "

" If you have a personality predisposed to liberalism, you might gravitate more to the artsy crowd or the anti-establishment crowd. And then those peers will affect you, and they will give you values, and you will copy them. "

" 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. "

" Democrats talk about programs like Social Security or Medicare, but it's not clear to most voters what Democrats' core moral values are. "

" Politics is really religion. Politics is about sacredness. Politics is about offering a vision that will bind the nation together to pursue greatness. "