Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.

The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status.

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.

It's sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we've been wrong, this is information about ourselves worth having.

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.

The difference between physics and metaphysics is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not.