As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.

Go ahead and believe in God , if you like, but don't imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science.

We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it.

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.

Is he a dread genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical as werewolves. By increasing the information we have about the various causes of the constraints that limit our current opportunities, he has increased our powers to avoid what we want to avoid, prevent what we want to prevent. Knowledge of the roles of our genes, and the genes of the other species around us, is not the enemy of human freedom, but one of its best friends.

If nobody cares, then it doesn't matter what happens to flowers.

Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible.