Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.

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.

You can't bury a part of yourself that's so innate to who you've been, even if it's not for the sake of anything other than a pure enjoyment of it.

Paisley has been and remains a greater threat to the Union than the Foreign Office and the Provisional IRA rolled into one.

The mass starts into a million suns; Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issue from the first.

Love people enough to tell them the truth and respect them enough to trust that they can handle it.

It is a maxim of old that among themselves all things are common to friends.

This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.

We should not let grass grow on the path of friendship.

The kind of churches we played in, it wasn't about how good you could play your instrument, it was about how much you enjoyed playing your instrument.

Life isn't much more than a big dig through layers of doubt and fear into new levels of power and potential.

I don't see why someone should lose their life just so you can have a snack.