We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency.

The question itself [of UFOs] I think is legitimate. It's interesting, it's fascinating. It's mythic in scale and one of the grand questions. It's like the God question or, you know, the meaning-of-life question. It's one of those, on that scale. So you'd have to be made of wood not to be interested and, you know, have they come here? Are they up there?

Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.

When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.

My thesis is that morality exists outside the human mind in the sense of being not just a trait of individual humans, but a human trait; that is, a human universal.