[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

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.

Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.

Just because those around you do not constantly tell you what they are going through in their personal life, it does not mean they are living in a fairytale.

Tim Stoutheart was afraid, too, ” I said. “But he went on. I expect you to do the same.

If all do not join now to save the good old ship of the Union this voyage nobody will have a chance to pilot her on another voyage.

Do something good and someone might imitate it.

Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain.

Cheerless poverty has no harder trial than this, that it makes men the subject of ridicule. [Lat., Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se Quam quod ridiculos homines facit.]

I have to believe that literature can effect change; otherwise, I would have no purpose in my life and would have wasted four years on Ilustrado.

There's nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write history.

Jesus & his apostles & disciples were all artists