Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.

[P]rescientific people... could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero.

The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.

I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.

Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.

I think history has shown that the worst way to [try to] bring people over and actually change public opinion is by insult and applied degradation of them.

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified. Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as is widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from prescientific cultures.