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When secular institutions succeed in increasing trust and cooperation in a society, they encroach on religion’s job and precipitate its decline.

Prosocial religions, with their Big Gods who watch, intervene, and demand hard-to-fake loyalty displays, facilitated the rise of cooperation in large groups of anonymous strangers. In turn, these expanding groups took their prosocial religious beliefs and practices with them, further ratcheting up large-scale cooperation in a runaway process of cultural evolution.

Heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.

We’ll sue, and it will take years, and the city will pay because millions and millions are still cheaper than putting a true price on killing a black boy.

Was he a monument to hope, or to insanity? He was a man grasping after an impossible solution. How long do you keep trying to save something that has been lost?

There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.

People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.

I have so many friends who love these books and have recommended them to me time and again.

All Terry Pratchett books have been purchased.

Let's light this candle!

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In fact, this question—“Did they believe in what they were doing?”—is actually a small part of a much larger question, one which goes to the heart of the nature of the Soviet Union itself: Did any of its leaders ever believe in what they were were doing?

Are events that are forgotten by all the participants, or that weren’t admitted to cognition in the first place, something other than events, or are they nothing? Do the witnesses make the event?

They were chameleonic, in some ways perhaps had less integrity and shallower values and were selfish, “everyone for themselves,” but it was these very qualities, and their lack of apology for them, that let Americans seize power over the world.

For the human mind will always favour a narrative that centres the human experience.

What is one life worth without money?
This is the question of the century.

Intelligence is not necessarily a great evolutionary boon. Large brains, complex neurologies and existential angst are expensive, developmentally and energetically. If you could do without them, you would. The majority of species aren’t subject to the sorts of pressures and challenges that make the cost and the complications worth it.

I've lost my child at the bend where we parted.
We will never come back to that hour.

The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.

Those few, golden years when he believed Heidegger would save his life.

I now have a talk that begins with the question, “How long does it take to write a novel?” and the answer is, as long as you’ve lived up to the time you sit down to write the novel, and then some.

“Possibly I was shown just a little too much of death, because, really, my friend, life means as little as death; life leads to death and both amount to nothing.”

I wonder if there are blasphemers of Satan, and if to blaspheme against him is a sin, from his point of view but also from God's.