Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.

Believe it or not — and I know that most people do not — violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species's existence.

The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life.

The blank slate doctrine, holding that the human mind has no inherent structure and is shaped entirely by experience, is itself a kind of myth — a politically convenient story rather than a scientific finding.

The wise man is free from passions, not because he does not feel, but because his judgments are correct.

-- Chrysippus of Soli

The pleasant life is produced not by endless drinking and revelry but by sober reasoning.

-- Epicurus

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

-- David Hume

What is rational is real; and what is real is rational.

-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

World history is progress in the consciousness of freedom.

-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Good sense is the most evenly distributed thing in the world.

-- René Descartes