Robert Wright Quotations

When I dropped her off at the shelter, I went to see how our house was. We have nothing except for a chimney, ... Pretty much, we had nothing left.

What you'll learn tonight is it doesn't stop with technical solutions, but that relationships really matter. If we can do anything, it would be to encourage you to develop strong, healthy, deep relationships with your children.

Our issue isn't to get 20 year-olds to watch Brian (Williams), but to get 40 year-olds to watch Brian and to get 35 year-olds to think about (watching Brian),

Today's investment is another step in our effort to seek out new platforms for NBC programming and content,

We don't have any plans to make acquisitions at this scale, but we will look at smaller acquisitions of tools or other things that enhance the site.

When you listen to the way some of the lawmakers have talked about it, they've been talking about it as if this company is going to control the whole port of New York and New Jersey. That's very far from the case.

Every image tells a story. They pilfered each other's tribes. They fought the cavalry. They fought disease. They fought trappers.

This is going to be a profitable transaction, ... This one we could afford on a modest budget.

It was both difficult and it was contentious. But that wasn't the point. When it all came down it was a 5-0 approval with the conditions. In this way, I think everyone was able to take their egos, their biases, and their prejudices and leave them at the door.

It's an unpredictable runaway chemical reaction no one predicted.

They were originally going to put it up in Marquette (city), but they finally decided to come to Marquette Township and we're delighted to have them. It should be a nice addition to Marquette Township.

If you?re in a position where you can?t remove yourself, do you really hold those kids responsible?

Canada and the U.S. are violating the international laws designed to protect our shared lakes and rivers from pollution. An independent inquiry by the CEC (North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation) will uncover why Canada and the U.S. have failed to resolve the dispute by not enforcing the century-old treaty.

The hotel is the one thing they're going to work on immediately.

The main goal is to give young people hope ... to give them skills,

Once you the forces that govern behavior,it's harder to blame the behaver

Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps keep social change safe from itself.

Corruption is knowing when something is not being done, knowing when the American people are being left unprotected and when you make a decision not to do something to protect the American people And you effectively allow 9/11 to occur. That is the ultimate form of government corruption-dereliction of duty. That's subject in the military to prosecution, to court martial. Frankly, if not treason.

God knows greed won't vanish. Neither will hatred or chauvanism. Human nature is a stubborn thing. But it isn't beyond control. Even if our core impulses can;t be banished, they can be tempered and redirected.

Actually, there is a sense in which polygynous marriage has not been the historical norm - even where polygyny is permitted, multiple wives are generally reserved for a relatively few men who can afford them or qualify via formal rank. For eons and eons, most marriages have been monogamous, even though most societies haven't been

Giving men marriage tips is a little like offering Vikings a free booklet titled How Not to Pillage.

Whereas modern cynicism brought despair about the ability of the human species to realize laudable ideals, postmodern cynicism doesn't — not because it's optimistic, but because it can't take ideals seriously in the first place. The prevailing attitude is Absurdism. A postmodern magazine may be irreverent, but not bitterly irreverent, for it's not purposefully irreverent; its aim is indiscriminate, because everyone is equally ridiculous. And anyway, there's no moral basis for passing judgment. Just sit back and enjoy the show.

We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.

Being a person's true friend means endorsing the untruths he holds dearest.

..various people had long had the feeling that gain through pain was nature's way

We're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)

In the great non zero sum games of history, if you're part of the problem, then you'll likely be a victim of the solution.

Humans have various ways of coping with extended stress, and one is the anticipation of a better time. Here, as with retribution, there is often a kind of symmetry: the more intense the stress and the more hopeless the situation, the more fabulous the coming times that are anticipated.

Maybe the growth of "God" signifies the existence of God. That is: if history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral growth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe - conceivably - the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.

Next time you see an unblemished expanse of grass, think about the chemicals that probably got dumped in your vicinity to create it. Are you grateful for that?

If war can indeed be turned into a relic, then the virtue of greed will recede further. From a given society's standpoint, one big upside of wanton material acquisition has traditionally been the way it drives technological progress-which, after all, helps keep societies strong. In the nineteenth century, Russia ans Germany had little choice about modernizing; in those days stasis invited conquest. But if societies no longer face conquest, breakneck technological advance is an offer they can refuse, and frugality a luxury people can afford.

Next time you see a yardful of sprouting dandelions, note that they look remarkably like things we call "flowers." And later, when the flowers turn into fluff balls, look closely at one of those fluff balls and ask yourself whether it's really so unattractive.

Understanding the often unconscious nature of genetic control is the first step toward understanding that—in many realms, not just sex—we’re all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer.

Darwin was one of our finest specimens. He did superbly what human beings are designed to do: manipulate social information to personal advantage. The information in question was the prevailing account of how human beings, and all organisms, came to exist; Darwin reshaped it in a way that radically raised his social status. When he died in 1882, his greatness was acclaimed in newspapers around the world, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey, not far from the body of Isaac Newton. Alpha-male territory.

If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it.

...human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their ignorance of the misuse.

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

Jesus is not from Georgia. Jesus does not speak English. And Jesus is not a member of the NRA.

Think of it : zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another : 'My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death'. And you are one of those organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity.

Your brain may give birth to any technology, but other brains will decide whether the technology thrives. The number of possible technologies is infinite, and only a few pass this test of affinity with human nature.