I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite - or too devout - to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human 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.

I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.

Don’t allow anyone to pollute your mind with negative thoughts and negative words.

I'm not an American hero. I'm a person who loves children.

I used to be a street singer in San Francisco.

He sobbed in desperation at the burden of fear he carried with him every day of his life.

Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, an' it keeps on laughin'.

Civilizations proceed from the heart rather than from the head.

In the past stories have been what tethers us to the world and they've made us who we are.

Most people call me Mercy. I like it

The true privilege of being Mayor is that I have the opportunity to be everyone's neighbor.