Baboons who have friends do much better in terms of their physiology. And if that applies to a baboon, it could certainly apply for a human.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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'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.

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

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

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

An open mind is prerequisite to an open heart.

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

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.

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.

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.

I think the Egyptian people need to restore confidence that Americans, the U.S., means what they say when they talk about democracy, rule of law.

Barack Obama has injected fresh momentum into efforts - stalled for a decade - to bring about nuclear disarmament.

I'm not a good small talker. I'm not into small talk, frankly.