If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.

If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.

In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.

In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.

Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.

M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.

Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.

Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.

Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth.

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.

One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.

Paris Hilton, it turns out, is related to fellow celebrity jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor and G. Gordon Liddy.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.

Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business.

Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.

Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.