Quotes from Robert Wright

The Dalai Lama has said, "Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.

from natural selection's point of view, status assistance is the main purpose of friendship.

The Buddha said anger has a "poisoned root and honeyed tip.

If you accept the idea that many of our most troublesome feelings are in one sense or another illusions, then meditation can be seen as, among other things, a process of dispelling illusions.

In other words, if you were to build into the brain a component in charge of public relations, it would look something like the conscious self.

understanding the ultimate source of your suffering doesn't, by itself, help very much.

People may chuckle appreciatively at a male turkey that tries to mate with a poor rendition of a female's [suspended] head, but if you then point out that many a human male regularly gets aroused after looking at two-dimensional representations of a nude woman, they don't see the connection.

Once you the forces that govern behavior,it's harder to blame the behaver

We are right to say that we never dislike people without a reason. But the reason, often, is that it is not in our interests to like them; liking them won't elevate our social status, aid our acquisition of material or sexual resources, help our kin, or do any of the other things that during evolution have made genes prolific. The feeling of "rightness" accompanying our dislike is just window dressing. Once you've seen that, the feeling's power may diminish.

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" asked the Christian theologian Tertullian... Having received the revealed thruth via Christ, "we want no curious disputation." Well that was then. Today science is so powerful that theologians can't casually dismiss secular knowledge. For most... Athens and Jerusalem must be reconciled or Jerusalem will fall off the map. Philo's thoughtful answer is 'Logos')

We are designed to feel that the next great goal will bring bliss, and the bliss is designed to evaporate shortly after we get there. Natural selection has a malicious sense of humor; it leads us along with a series of promises and then keeps saying "Just kidding.

What there is to be proud of? One answer is: Darwin-like behavior. Go above and beyond the call of a smoothly functioning conscience; help those who aren´t likely to help you in return, and do so when nobody is watching

The idea is that human culture as broadly defined--art, politics, technology, religion, and so on--evolves in much the way biological species evolve: new cultural traits arise and may flourish or perish, and as a result whole institutions can belief systems form and change.

Understanding the often unconscious nature of genetic control is the first step toward understanding that—in many realms, not just sex—we're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer.

The gratification of curiosity rather frees us from uneasiness than confers pleasure; we are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction.

We think we're better than average at not being biased in thinking that we're better than average.

There is in the world today a great and mysterious force that shapes the fortunes of millions of people. It is called the stock market.

If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together—the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness—you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.

feelings are "true" if the judgments they encode are accurate

feelings are "false" or perhaps "illusory" if they lead the organism astray—

It is the study of how the human brain was designed—by natural selection—to mislead us, even enslave us.

This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance

Is there something? Is there anything? Is there any evidence of something? Any signs that there's more to life that the sum of its subatomic particles - some larger purpose, some deeper meaning, maybe even something that would qualify as "divine" in some sense of the word?

William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience that religion "consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.