There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.

If we don't play God, who will?

A clone of Einstein wouldn't be stupid, but he wouldn't necessarily be any genius, either.

[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.

The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls.

Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. 5