Words&Dirt

“Social life requires some degree of restraint.  A social grouping cannot stay together if its members make frequent and unrestrained attacks on one another.  Just when a pattern of restraint toward other members of the group becomes a social ethic is hard to say; but ethics probably began in these pre-human patterns of behavior rather than in the deliberate choices of fully-fledged, rational human beings.”

––The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress, by Peter Singer, pg. 4

“You called it sex if you were successful at alienating emotion from the act.  It was love all along, but nobody told me.”

––Memories with Maya, by Clyde Dsouza, loc. 1752