However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.

Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

Evil…doesn’t mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to “the Christian majority’s” private liking.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferociousdefence? One might have supposed him amply capable of lookingafter himself.

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration tomoral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually writtenin it?

More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.

There's no equivalent to Mozart in writing.

To be slightly evil is to embrace life.

For how long are you going to keep wasting your money, time, and energy trying to impress people who will never matter in your life?

In the best interest of profession, a writer should sometimes refrain from writing.

For higher-level execs with greater public visibility, social networks need to become as good at filtering as they are at connecting.

You never know how a good quest is going to end.

The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day.

I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.

As long as my husband's looking at me, that's all I care about!