If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.

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.

Sometimes advises from others are more difficult to bear with than even slang.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

Blood, always precious, is priceless when it streams from Immanuel's side.

I sent my daughter 40 roses last November because I thought she was 40. And she laughed her head off. She is not going to be 40 until this year!

No one will love you more than you love your pain.

There are ten thousand states of mind. Most people spend their entire lives confined to a few of these states of mind.

Enough experience will make you wise.

I've always considered my work one piece and I consider that my work won't be finished until I am dead and buried and I hope that's a long, long time.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.

The strength of democratic societies relies on their capacity to know how to stand firm against extremism while respecting justice in the means used to fight terrorism.