To many people today, however, rights are something to protect us against the demands of morality.

Besides, morality is not about whether the human race survives, but about what kind of survival it gets. We marry; guppies don’t. We don’t eat our young; they do. Yet neither species is in danger of extinction.

An unsound thinker goes where his motives and interests invite him; a sound thinker goes where the argument takes him.

In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam’s Razor but Occam’s Beard: “Multiply entities unnecessarily.

Only good was created. Every evil thing is a good thing ruined. There are no other ways to get an evil thing.

Even a liar’s speech expresses something true; it may not tell us the state of the world, but it tells us the state of his heart.

We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. GEORGE ORWELL.

What your body does is unrelated to your heart. Don’t believe it. The same survey reports that hooking up commonly takes place when both participants are drinking or drunk, and it’s not hard to guess the reason why: After a certain amount of this, you may need to get drunk to go through with it.

Pleasure comes naturally as a by-product of pursuing something else, like the good of another person, and the best way to ruin pleasure is to make it your goal.

To penetrate the unknown, the mind must begin with what is known already. George Orwell wrote that “We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” This book is an attempt at re-statement.