There may be some deep questions about the cosmos that are forever beyond science. The mistake is to think they are therefore not beyond religion too.

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.

Those we love never truly leave us, Harry. There are things that death cannot touch.

From dead plant matter to nematodes to bacteria, never underestimate the cleverness of mushrooms to find new food!

It's fun to play people who are flawed.

You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.

People are shaped by friendship as much as by romance.

Trade has ever been the extinguisher of war, the eradicator of prejudice, the diffuser of knowledge.

And I don't want you to be anywhere but here

One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds.

I always find myself pulled back into the fantasy genre, and I can't really explain it.

It's out there at sea that you are really yourself.