As efficiently as our phones connect us to one another, and as much as we take advantage of that, we must remember that they have the power to alienate us, too.

I hope I'm always appropriate on 'JR' if it's a serious case. But if you have a case of a man who has a wardrobe malfunction with a lime green mankini, even I on the odd occasion find it mildly amusing.

The law is the law whether you're dealing with a multi-million-pound fraud or a car deal where someone feels diddled because their exhaust falls off on the way home.

I don't want to be a total moron and be just known as the jazz-handed judge.

I really want to emphasise this - 'Strictly' is a positive show. It's interesting that it gets cast into this, understandably, the ordinary net of reality shows, but there's no part of it which feels nihilistic or unpleasant. It's all about learning something and doing well, and you feel this overwhelming sense of people wanting you to do well.

If a deal advertised on an unknown website looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

You can separate the church and state all you like, but Christmas is inescapable, and it's marvellous, and it's not going away.

My musical taste is somewhat dated - I mean, freeze frame, go back 60 years, and you're in my comfort zone.

One of the happy consequences of my brain is that I rarely sleep.

Youthful beauty is a poor indicator of long-term appeal in a man.

When I first heard Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way,' I looked out the window for the car alarm going off.

Never trust people; always trust paper. I'd marry a piece of paper if I could.

There is a balance between mindful that you don't upset anyone, yet maintaining an authenticity that is not wrapped up in the minutiae of people's judgments of you.

It is difficult to ever think about your loved one having suffered.

If you are a politician who styles yourself as a model of family virtue but are having a secret affair, you have no right to expect it to remain secret.

Great broadcasting requires all of us, those who are in positions of power and especially those who are in positions to employ people, to remember you need to look towards the greatest conceivable palate to create greatness.

I think with 'Strictly,' people don't want you to do badly. They're willing you to do well.

I was an appalling person to teach. At 14, I was pretty advanced. I would read all the books in a few minutes, and I was bored. It must have been awful for a teacher to have a bright boy who's giving them his undivided indifference.

I think I'm incredibly stoic. If I have a bad headache, it takes a while before I reach for a tablet.

I find it amusing when you look at plastic surgeons because they don't seem to have had anything done.

I loathe people who are disingenuous or inauthentic.

I respond well to terribly beautiful, terribly brilliant Russian women.

I like people to be authentic, thoughtful, and honest.

There's certainly more chance of me winning 'Strictly' than having an affair with my dance partner, but you know, who knows?

It's always nice to have new clothes made for you.

I can conduct and play musical instruments, but dancers' counting is different - they only go to eight beats, which doesn't relate to a bar.

As a lawyer, I've dealt with really serious offences, and the public rarely hear what the true impact is on the victims' families. When you hear it from the mouths of victims, your entire approach changes, because it could happen to anybody, and they articulate that in such a powerful way.

On TV, the nitty-gritty of trials takes place between commercial breaks, whereas, of course, reality is infinitely more complex. True crime also makes us more empathetic.

Is it exploitative to get the victim of an unimaginably horrific crime to talk on my show 'Crime Stories?' No, it's crucial.

Learning about crime in great detail forces us to ask ourselves how it happened, how the victims and perpetrators got to that point, how the law works, how the police force functions.

For me, the single most important question is how to construct a society that is just, safe, peaceful - all those good things - when people finally accept that there is no free will.

Literal cleanliness and orderliness can release us from abstract cognitive and affective distress - just consider how, during moments where life seems to be spiraling out of control, it can be calming to organize your clothes, clean the living room, get the car washed.

That's what stress management is about, that's what psychotherapy is about, finding religion, or finding your loved one or your hobby - any of those, they give you more outlets, more of a sense of control, more of a sense of predictability, of social support. They give you the means to psychologically finesse ambiguous outside reality.

It's insanely difficult for people to accept the extent to which we are biological organisms without agency.

An open mind is prerequisite to an open heart.

Many of our moments of prosociality, of altruism and Good Samaritanism, are acts of restitution, attempts to counter our antisocial moments.

If you turn on the stress response chronically for purely psychological reasons, you increase your risk of adult-onset diabetes and high blood pressure.

We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.

We're a miserably violent species. But there's a complication, which is we don't hate violence, we hate the wrong kind. And when it's the right kind, we cheer it on, we hand out medals, we vote for, we mate with our champions of it. When it's the right kind of violence, we love it.

If you're a baboon on the Serengeti, and you're miserable, it's almost certainly because some other baboon has had the free time and energy to devote to making you miserable.

We have this amazing ability to turn on the exactly same stress response worrying about a mortgage that a zebra does when it's sprinting away from a lion.

The first roller coaster I ever went on in my life wasn't until college.

My lab looks at the ability of stress hormones to kill brain cells, and basically we are trying to understand on a molecular level how a neuron dies after a stroke, a seizure, Alzheimer's, brain aging, and what these stress hormones do to make it worse.

There's a science to what sort of people we're attracted to, and it has to do with everything from how similar they are to us, to what sort of pheromones we imprinted on when we were little, and what variants of genes we have related to the neurochemical oxytocin.

Juvenile justice is probably the area that's most ripe for reform, in the nice liberal sense of the word, simply because there's no getting around the fact that a teenage brain is not an adult brain.

I used to very politely say that if there is free will then it's in all sorts of boring places, like whether you're going to pick up this or that fork as you begin your meal. There really is none: It's all biology.

Disgust is a very powerful tool for bringing about crowd violence. If a group can be dehumanized and made into the Other, the 'them,' to treat that group horribly is made much easier.

When you're being asked to think about the meaning of your intuitions before you act on them, maybe along the way you decide your intuitions are destructive or make no sense at all. And then you don't act on them.

For moral judgment, I think the most interesting trends in neuroscience are the ways in which judgments vary as a function of how emotionally salient the situation is.

Being president does seem a lot more stressful than being vice president.