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

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

" Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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? "

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

" 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 began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A. "

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

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

" Conservatives tend to see the world more in terms of good-versus-evil and, for some of them, the nightmare is a disarmed citizenry that can be preyed upon by criminals. They know that having a gun in the house would increase the risk of an accident for a member of their family, but they're willing to take that risk. "

" Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service. "

" 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. "

" When you hear someone criticize a policy on the other side, that's fine. But when you start hearing motive-mongering and demonization, stand up to it just as you would if it were something that was racist or sexist. If we avoid the demonization, disagreements can be positive. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We humans are really good at forming groups to compete, and then dissolving the groups and reforming them along different lines to compete in a different way. "

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

" 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 reality is so complicated that, once you join one team or the other, you become specialized in detecting certain patterns, but you become blind to other patterns. "