Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.

• Our scientific age demands that we provide definitions, measurements, and statistics in order to be taken seriously. Yet most of the important things in life cannot be precisely defined or measured. Can we define or measure love, beauty, friendship, or decency, for example?
• To be told that one can be dependent on one's parents until age 26 should strike a young person who wants to grow up as demeaning, not as something to celebrate.
• Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.
• Our scientific age demands that we provide definitions, measurements, and statistics in order to be taken seriously. Yet most of the important things in life cannot be precisely defined or measured. Can we define or measure love, beauty, friendship, or decency, for example?
• Goodness is about character - integrity, honesty, kindness, generosity, moral courage, and the like. More than anything else, it is about how we treat other people.
• The essence of the Hebrew Bible, transmitted by Christianity, is separation: between life and death, nature and God, good and evil, man and woman, and the holy and the profane.
• One of the great mind destroyers of college education is the belief that if it's very complex, it's very profound.
• Socialism values equality more than liberty.
• Liberals tend to put the onus of your success on society and conservatives on you and your family.
• Opponents of capital punishment argue that the state has no right to take a murderer's life. Apparently, one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting not only on behalf of society, but also on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person's family.