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

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" I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life. "

" Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology. "

" As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide. "

" Regardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never outlawed, ought to be resisted. Though commonly flaunted as a sign of sophistication, it can be an opportunity for one-upmanship and an excuse for misanthropy, especially against the young. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties. "

" As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender. "

" I don't think aggression works like thirst or sleep. I think aggression is more elicited by particular situations. I think it can be mitigated. "

" 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. "

" Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain. "

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

" M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say. "

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

" Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with. "

" Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. "

" I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net. "

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

" The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years. "

" Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That's why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy. "

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

" 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. "

" I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events. "