After sleeping through a hundred million centuries, we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life.

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.

No matter how sophisticated the camera, the photographer is still the one that makes it.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Even post-WWII, nobody talked about the Holocaust. It wasn't until the '50s that people started talking about it.

Virtue consists in avoiding vice, and is the highest wisdom. [Lat., Virtus est vitium fugere, et sapientia prima.]

The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character.

My most disastrous date was not so much a disaster as uncomfortable for both parties involved.

We are in a position, as musicians, to touch the souls of those who listen.

I can tell you this: I'm an extremely passionate individual. I try to be careful how I display it because you never know how people are going to take it.

Fame is a heavy burden.

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.