People who criticize The Selfish Gene like that often haven't read it. The selfish gene accounts for altruism toward kin and individuals who might be in a position to reciprocate your altruism.

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.

There is a nearly unerring, unconscious radar that zeros in on relationships that repeat our childhood experiences.

Sons branch out but one woman leads to another.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

I think it has most to do with the way in which a story is told, whether it feels real either via the music of the telling or the honesty of the story.

A president can be as strong as she wants to be.

Practice makes permanent, not perfect. If you practice the wrong thing, you make the wrong act permanent.

You're an island of reality in an ocean of diarrhea.

Al Roker said I am 80 years 'young'; it's like saying Al Roker is 320 pounds 'thin'.

I like when people have opinions - especially about art. You can hate my art. I made my art to be hated. That's why I made the name paintings.

All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.