Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

Intelligence is a valuable thing, but it is not usually the key to survival. Sheer fecundity ... usually counts. The intelligent gorilla doesn't do as well as the less intelligent but more-fecund rat, which doesn't do as well as the still-less-intelligent but still-more-fecund cockroach, which doesn't do as well as the minimally-intelligent but maximally-fecund bacterium.

Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.

No one can possibly have lived through the Great Depression without being scarred by it. No amount of experience since the depression can convince someone who has lived through it that the world is safe economically.

The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.

That's the harm of Close Encounters: that it convinces tens of millions that that's what just science fiction is.

There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.