Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.

Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.

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.

Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.