...but I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

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

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

Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.

There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly.

In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. All the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be products of a cascade of generate-and-test procedures that are, at bottom, algorithmic and mindless.