'It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand? That lemming drive you're talking about is there - but there's another kind of drive, another kind of force that's working a against it. Or else there wouldn't still be any people and there wouldn't be the words to have this conversation and-' She paused, looked down at herself. 'And I wouldn't be here to say them.'

Call it: joy. The thing like pleasure that you feel when you've done a good thing or passed up a real tempting chance to do a bad thing. Or when the unfolding …

Now I can say that I have sampled the spectrum of the pleasure system at both ends - none and all there is - and I think the rest of my life I will dedicate my…

Man has historically devoted much more subtle and ingenious thought to inflicting cruelty than to giving others pleasure - which, given his gregarious nature, …