[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.

Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.

The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper

Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.

Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.

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.