The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it.

For many, to live in a universe that may have no purpose, and no creator, is unthinkable.

I like to say that while antimatter may seem strange, it is strange in the sense that Belgians are strange. They are not really strange; it is just that one rarely meets them.

I hope that every [person] at one point in their life has the opportunity to have something that is at the heart of their being, something so central to their being that if they lose it they won't feel they're human anymore, to be proved wrong because that's the liberation that science provides. The realization that to assume the truth, to assume the answer before you ask the questions leads you nowhere.

We all trust each other to some extent. We have to rely on experts to some extent, but we should learn to be sceptical.

Occam's razor suggests that, if some event is physically plausible, we don't need recourse to more extraordinary claims for its being. Surely the requirement of an all-powerful deity who somehow exists outside of our universe, or multiverse, while at the same time governing what goes on inside it, is one such claim. It should thus be a claim of last, rather than first, resort.

The fact is that people would rather cling when they're afraid of something to a priori beliefs than rather open their minds about it.