People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.

Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.

The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition — thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.

Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.

But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper.

I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.

In comparison, Google is brilliant because it uses an algorithm that ranks Web pages by the number of links to them, with those links themselves valued by the number of links to their page of origin.

Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.

I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears

For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance - or identity - were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.

To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.

Happiness does not completely depend on comforts or opulence. Even a pauper can be happier than a prince.

The real measure of your wealth is how much you'd be worth if you lost all your money.

Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.

We pretend to be a free society, and we pretend to be an adult society, but if you look at the facts, our news is just as contrived, and controlled as Pravda!

I liked Nixon fine, but Nixon was not a partier

One of President Obama's winning points last night was about how sanctions against Iran are crippling their economy. And believe me, if anyone knows how to cripple an economy, it's President Obama.

A prosthetic leg with a Willie Nelson bumper sticker washed ashore on the beach, which meant it was Florida. Then it got weird.