I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true.

Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.

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

Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion.

Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings.

Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.

The less you think, the more you believe.

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Science is the poetry of reality.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

We come to a house and walk down the small walkway to its backyard. In the yard there are two screens and a slide projector. People are seated in lawn chairs, watching slides of trees.

When he admires the man he calls his father: a man slightly above the scum of the earth—what does that speak about he who admires him?

People sacrifice the present for the future. But life is available only in the present. That is why we should walk in such a way that every step can bring us to the here and the now.

Creativity requires a lot of pass/fail/start again and it is often hard on the psyche.

We are all the same in that we all want to be different.

I wrote for many years without showing my writing to anyone, because I was constantly comparing it to what I was reading. You have to compare yourself to the best and feel totally inadequate.

I'm a performer. We don't retire.

The most useful is the greatest.

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

True success has more components than one sentence or idea can contain.