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.

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?

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.

Hope is a Waking Dream By Aristotile

Nobody would ever convince me that the bronchitis and pneumonia were caused by cigarettes.

The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It's easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It's less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.

I master my doubts now. I have fun with them, they're my travelling companions.

I seldom went to bed before two or three o'clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night.

Chastity is not chastity in an old man, but a disability to be unchaste.

The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.

Love is a severe mental disorder.

Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

Greatness, generally speaking, is an unusual quantity of a usual quality grafted upon a common man.