[Alternative medicine is defined as] that set of practices that cannot be tested, refuse to be tested or consistently fail tests.

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.

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

Being anti-social can also mean that you're aware of how annoying it is to be social.

A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.

The olive grove of Academe, Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.

Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.

There are different things one can do to establish and hasten the peace process. Meditation is one way.

What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

What's a word, a talisman, to hold against the world?

When you are 16 there is no fear whatsoever. As you get older you play in more important games and that is when you start thinking about what will happen if you win or lose.