The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God this that here really are lots of ways of repaying your debt of goodness - by setting to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come.

You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.

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

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

The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died

Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.

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.