Quotes from Robert Wright

Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw." In that sense, he observed, "our immediate family is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone.

William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience that religion "consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.

Human nature consists of knobs and of mechanisms for tuning the knobs, and both are invisible in their own way.

If people are basically selfish -and they are- then asking them to work hard yet earn no more than their unproductive neighbor is asking more than they'll rarely give. But we already know that; communism has failed.

From natural selection's point of view, status assistance is the main purpose of friendship.

So long as a society remains economically stratified, the challenge of reconciling lifelong monogamy with human nature will be large. Incentives and disincentives (moral and/or legal) may be necessary.

The great American psychologist William James wrote, "Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw." In that sense, he observed, "our immediate family is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone.

An interesting question these psychologists tend not to ask is why the muscle metaphor is apt. In other words, why is it that early successes at self-discipline lead to more successes, whereas early lapses lead to more lapses? If self-discipline is really good for the organism, you wouldn't expect natural selection to make it so easy for a few early lapses to destroy self-discipline. Yet there's no denying that a few injections of heroin can be the end of a productive life. Why?

Being in closer-than-usual contact with the actual workings of your mind can lead you to confront issues with a new and perhaps unsettling honesty.

If one function of low self-esteem is to keep high-status people satisfied with your deference, then its level, strictly speaking, should depend on how much deference it takes to do that; you may, in the presence of someone powerful, feel a deeper humility—about your intelligence, for example—than an objective observer would see as warranted.

Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than virtue.

So if meditation did liberate you from obedience to these feelings, it would be, in a certain sense, dispelling an illusion—the illusion you implicitly subscribe to when you follow the feeling, the illusion that the rage, and for that matter the revenge it inspires, is fundamentally "good." It turns out the feeling isn't even good in the basic sense of self-interest.