There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism .

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.

We live in a time when we have a communal duty to receive and broadcast love. We must set aside our repeating arguments and get a handle on our destructive depressions.pg vi

Me myself is enough to manage.

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

I am a soul in the world: in the world of my soul the whirled light from the day the sacked land of my father.

Well, yes: people write poems when they are in love, but a wise man will not print them.

I never met a lasagna I didn't like

But life is a great school. It thrashes and bangs and teaches you.

I accept the resurrection of Easter Sunday not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as a historical event.

A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.

"Aphrodite," she said. "Venus?" Hazel asked in amazement. "Mom," Piper said, with no enthusiasm.