Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.

The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.

Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.