The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.

True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.

Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details.

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.

In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all.

We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be "informavores", epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.

I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.