One thing is certain: you will find plenty of worthwhile things to do. You will not be bored, or lack fulfillment in your life. Most important of all, you will know that you have not lived and died for nothing, because you will have become part of the great tradition of those who have responded to the amount of pain and suffering in the universe by trying to make the world a better place.

If you earn a lot of money, you can give away a lot of money.

If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.

If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?

The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.