Free speech is not just another value. It's the foundation of Western civilization.

Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.

We have to rediscover the eternal values and then live them out.

Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

Become aware of your own insufficiency.

You may say, 'Well, dragons don't exist.' It's, like, yes they do - the category 'predator' and the category 'dragon' are the same category. It absolutely exists. It's a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists.

Men and women aren't the same. And they won't be the same. That doesn't mean that they can't be treated fairly.

I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.

The masculine spirit is under assault. It's obvious.

It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.

There's no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

It's a small percentage of people who do the 80-hour-a-week high-powered career thing, and they're almost all men. Why? Well, men are driven by socio-economic status more than women.

You can say, 'Well, isn't it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine' - well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn't matter, because that is how it's represented. It's been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can't change it. It's not possible. This is underneath everything.

It's in the best interest of the radical left types - best psychological and strategic interest - to refuse to admit to the possibility that reasonable people can object to their ideological staff. Because if reasonable people objected, that would imply that their ideological stance is not reasonable.

'Happiness' is a pointless goal.

To me, ideology is corrupt; it's a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you're an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you're religious, there's a mystery left there.

I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don't know exactly what's going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what's inside of them without being part of them.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.

Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.

If you're talking to a man who wouldn't fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you're talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.

I'm always surprised when people respond positively to what I am saying, given its seriousnessness and strange nature.

To master a new technology, you have to play with it.

I do believe that there are places where the mythological and the literal touch.

All things considered, there's nobody better for children than parents.

Part of the reason there's an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you're in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let's say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

One of the things I've told men over and over and over and over is if you're being rejected by all the women that you approach, it's not the women!

There were some great clinicians in the 20th century - great men. Freud was a genius; Jung was a genius, Carl Rogers was a genius - there's a half-dozen psychologists of the 1950s and humanists of the 1960s.

You can't go backward in life.

You can't just slander someone, defame them, lie about them. You can't incite people to crime. There's all sorts of reasonable restrictions on free speech that are already codified in the British common-law system.

A properly balanced story provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of, I could say the world, but it's actually a being. 'Harry Potter''s a good example. So Harry's the hero, right. But he's tainted with evil. There's a dark and a light in every bit of that narrative. It's well balanced.

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.

If you're a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.

That's another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it's as if things were coming together in my mind. It's like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it's it's like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.

Assuming if there's such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.

It's not proper for the government to intrude too thoroughly into the domain of the family. It's inappropriate.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There's just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

It's very difficult to regulate yourself, and if you learn to do that, well, it starts to spill over.

The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.

We're so immaturely cynical as a culture. We're not wise enough to look at an institution like marriage and to really things about what it means and what it signifies. It signifies a place where people can tie the ropes of their lives together so that they're stronger. It signifies a place where people can tell the truth to one another.

I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.

You can't have a value structure without a hierarchy. They're the same thing because a value structure means one thing takes precedence over another.

People have this capacity within them to set the world straight.

If you're not going to be rewarded for your virtues, and instead you're going to be punished for them, then what's your motivation to continue?

Everything isn't political.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.