Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.

The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene

The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.

This idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead-because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.

The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.

Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom-up.

A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm. It will actually do net good [...] rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland's ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.