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" Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other. "

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" Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance. "

" Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language. "

" Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person. "

" The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind. "

" Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist. "

" Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats? "

" An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate. "

" A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature. "

" We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade. "

" We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives. "

" People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely. "

" Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. "

" You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain. "

" Tom Hanks, who starred in 'The Da Vinci Code,' turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in 'The Da Vinci Code,' including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare. "

" 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. "

" You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs. "

" Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene. "

" Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity. "

" The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. "

" I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game. "

" The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing. "

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

" In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them. "

" Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control. "

" The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration. "

" Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. "

" I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means. "

" Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. "

" Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. "

" By all measures men are the more violent gender. "