“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...”

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

“My story is of such marvel that if it were written with a needle on the corner of an eye, it would yet serve as a lesson to those who seek wisdom.”

“There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,00...”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“You don't know me. You know one me, just like I know one you. And you can't know every me, and I can't know every you.”

“When I knew people, I knew me and when I knew me, I knew people.”

“Our spirit knows our purpose, let these en-grained impressions shape our perceptions of who we think we are today.”