The river of my title is a river of DNA, a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues

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 don't have to disrespect and insult others simply to hold your own ground. If you do, that shows how shaky your own position is.

The pain you have gone through will give you the strength of character to come through it all, so long as you learn from what you have suffered then it was not suffering at all.

Thinking always deceives us when it becomes a substitute for action.

I only wish to read, think and write.

Reading the play at home, however fulfilling, can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended.

I have made "start, grow and stay" a big part of my administration.

It's necessary to respect all other ways and other teachings on the subject because even though they may not make a lot of sense to us, they might to someone else. Who are we to say?

When I got to be about 16,17 I got into a beauty pageant and I was allowed to start playing around with makeup.

I don't ever want to be an average fourth starter. I want to be the big guy.

It is a mistake to think that one limits one’s risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence.