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.

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.

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

-- Chrysippus of Soli

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

-- Bertrand Russell

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

-- Benedictus de Spinoza

The divine law commands rational consideration of existing things and reflection upon them.

-- Averroes

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

-- Epicurus

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters.

-- Francisco Goya