Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.

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

We want to be special. We want our place in the cosmos to be central. We want evolution-even godless evolution-to have been directed toward us so that we stand at the pinnacle of nature's ladder of progress. Rewind the tape of life and we want to believe that we (Homo Sapiens) would appear again and again. Would we? Probably not.

The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.

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.

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.

The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.