"Lying eats into the soul. If it becomes a habit it frays the edge of your spirit. Truth telling, although sometimes harder to do, strengthens your heart. It serves a person ill not to tell the truth."

"All these years! All this time with us -- have you learned nothing?!You only live by the grace of our clan's tenet of forgiveness!Your judgement is shit!Rectitude is the bone that gives firmness and stature. Without decency, neither talent nor learning can make the human frame into a samurai."

"There's a popular concept of 'intelligence' as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that 'it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.' But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys."

"Growing up learning of distant lands and their bloody histories, Wareska had quickly noticed how pointing to someone else as unquestionably worse was a widely common justification for many atrocities."

"I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves."

"The news media is so quick to pick up tragic stories of imperiled children that it seems like there are more terrible events today than ever before - when in fact it's quite the opposite. It is, in all manners possible to calculate, the safest time in the history of civilization to be a kid."

"At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work."