“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...”

“Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.”

“A weapon does not decide whether or not to kill. A weapon is a manifestation of a decision that has already been made.”

“Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“We speak the truth because we live in truth.”

“There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.”

“But for what purpose was the earth formed?" asked Candide. "To drive us mad," replied Martin.”