Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds that today at least sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But Bolyai and Lobachevsky were able to accomplish this last feat (on a curved surface) in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately gods.

Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others?

We live in an in-between universe where things change all right...but according to patterns, rules, or as we call them, laws of nature.

[One's] inability to invalidate your hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.

The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.