In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.

People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children―especially, apparantly, their daughters.

The mind is the effect, not the cause.

If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter and motion, particles jostling on the one side, and the world of meaning and purpose, design on the other.

I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.