"The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose."
"The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction."
"Trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up?"
"Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams... but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality."
"When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That's what you should expect."
"Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree."
"Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world."
"Politics is really religion. Politics is about sacredness. Politics is about offering a vision that will bind the nation together to pursue greatness."
"It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience.' People who are high on openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable."
"Anytime we're interacting with someone, we're judging them, we're sharing expectations, we think they didn't live up to those expectations."
"Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams."
"There's an enormous difference between voting for a candidate because you hate another ethnic group and voting for a candidate because he's a member of your ethnic group."
"When I began my work on how morality varies across the political spectrum, there was a partisan, manipulative element to it. I wanted to help the Democrats win."
"By temperament and disposition and emotions, I'm a liberal; but in my beliefs about what's best for the country, I'm a centrist."
"In accounts of men in battle, there is an incredible adrenaline rush from group-versus-group conflict. The fervor and passion of partisans is clearly rewarding; and if it's rewarding, it involves dopamine; and if it involves dopamine, then it is potentially addictive."
"The big breakthrough for me was, once I stopped disliking conservatives and could actually see what they were right about, they showed me a lot of things that liberals were wrong about. But at the same time, I think there are some things that liberals are right about that conservatives have trouble seeing."
"Social reality is so complicated that, once you join one team or the other, you become specialized in detecting certain patterns, but you become blind to other patterns."
"I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts."
"Social conservatives are very focused on strengthening the family, and I think they are right to do so. One of the worst blind spots of the Left has been its reluctance to say that marriage matters for children."
"Liberals tend to be much more concerned about business and corporations as the oppressors. They look to government as the solution. On the Right it's the opposite. They see business as good, as what generates wealth in society, and they see government as the oppressor, which makes it hard for especially small businesspeople."
"On the religious Right and religious people in general have the feeling that the world is not just material, the world is not just there for us to do what we want with. That our bodies, things have an immaterial essence, a spiritual essence that God is in all of us."
"My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life?"
"People are voting for the kind of country they want to live in, and there are different views about what kind of country we should have."
"When you hear someone criticize a policy on the other side, that's fine. But when you start hearing motive-mongering and demonization, stand up to it just as you would if it were something that was racist or sexist. If we avoid the demonization, disagreements can be positive."
"Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues."
