Weapons and tactics change rarely but quickly, and history is unkind to those who do not keep pace.

If the actuality of human triumphs and tragedies overflowing the bounds of video games isn't enough to defeat claims that it's “not the real world,” then economics and politics will do the trick.

To fight cancer cells is to do battle with “more perfect versions of ourselves.”

The highest perfection contains just the right degree of imperfection.

Convictions are forged in argument, values forged in conflict. If we act as if everyone is entitled not only to one's opinion, but entitled not to be challenged on it, then we deprive ourselves and each other of the possibility of forming real convictions and values.

Even a 14 year-old girl can be a badass.

Traditional thinking about what motivates the poor is precisely backwards.

We sign contracts with our attention, the terms of which we haven't read.

Who we are at the airport is who we truly are.

“Nothing outside the mind can disturb it.”

As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now.

If our species doesn't survive, it will be because we didn't deserve to.

Markets are useful, but perfectly free markets are unsustainable.

Who and how we are depend in some measure on where we are.

Pluck the day.

The brain is an argument.

Europe's conquest of much of the world was due not to any innate superiority, but rather the region's disproportionate share of the world's grain and domesticable animal species, which supported a larger non-farming class of soldiers and engineers and turned the people themselves into biological weapons.

Due to flaws in our perception and the money to be made by exploiting them, you have to work really hard to live in the real world nowadays, so most of us don't.

Philosophy can be practical and philosophers can be badasses.

Life is a supermarket.