“Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. That means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an ape legacy that humans are doomed to live by.”

“Even evolutionary explanations of the traditional division of labor by sex do not imply that it is unchangeable, natural in the sense of good, or something that should be forced on individual women...”

“As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with h...”

“Instead of asking, Why is there war? we might ask, Why is there peace? We can obsess not just over what we have been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right. Because we have been do...”

“The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scho...”

“Friendship, like other kinds of altruism, is vulnerable to cheaters, and we have a special name for them: fair-weather friends. These sham friends reap the benefits of associating with a valuable p...”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are consider...”

“Language disguises thought.”

“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”