The price of liberty is, in addition to eternal vigilance, eternal patience with the vacuous blather occasionally expressed from behind the shield of free speech.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.

Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.

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

But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper.

Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world. ... But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.