[The writers of the holy books] did not even know the earth revolves around the sun. Why are we listening?

What people believe impacts on what they do. And it's not as if religion is universally bad. Of course it's responsible for many peoples doing good actions.

I can't prove that God doesn't exist, but I'd much rather live in a universe without one.

Teaching and writing, to me, is really just seduction; you go to where people are and you find something that they're interested in and you try and use that to convince them that they should be interested in what you have to say.

The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.

Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a 1 percent bit of pollution in a universe . . . we are completely irrelevant.