The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design.

My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. ... I care about what's true.

I've been reading an Alabama newspaper that one man shot another man because he beat him in a Bible-quoting competition.

I great difficulty having any respect for a religion that has so little confidence in the truth of its beliefs that it feels reduced to using threats in order to propagate those beliefs.

There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways.

We have sexual lust even though we know perfectly well that, because we're using contraception, it is not going to result in the propagation of our genes. That doesn't matter, because the lust was built into our brains at a time when there was no contraception.

I am not absolutely positive there is no god. Only in the sense that I'm not absolutely positive there is no large china teapot in orbit in the solar system.