“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...”

“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”

“I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.”

“Each voice carries a portion of value, no matter how unpalatable or distasteful that voice may be: no one person, government, ideology, transnational, or religious institution can own and dominate ...”

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”

“As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just...”

“Loneliness clarifies. Here silence standsLike heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral...”

“Vampires, contrary to popular belief, don't incinerate when exposed to sunlight. If that were true, there would be a heck of a lot more stories about spontaneous combustion around the world. They a...”

“Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.”

“I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight.”