I do believe that nice religious people make the world safe for extremists by teaching us [...] that faith is a virtue, teaching us that there's something good about holding beliefs without any substantiating evidence. Once you buy into that, [...] then the door is opened to extremists who defend their extremism by saying, 'Oh well, it's my faith, you can't touch it, you can't criticise my faith, I don't even need to defend it because faith is faith.'

There is an attitude in the culture that says that everybody is entitled to their opinion. You got to respect their opinion. No, you damn well haven't got to respect their opinion.

When we talk about genes for anything, like a gene for being gay or a gene for being aggressive or something of that sort, that a gene for anything may not have been a gene for that thing under different environmental conditions.

It has been convincingly demonstrated that countries where there are high rates of poverty, or high rates of economic inequality, are the countries with the highest rates of religious beliefs.

I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.

Some sort of belief in all-powerful supernatural beings is common, if not universal. A tendency to obey authority, perhaps especially in children, a tendency to believe what you're told, a tendency to fear your own death, a tendency to wish to see your loved ones who have died, to wish to see them again, a wish to understand where you came from, where the world came from, all these psychological predispositions, under the right cultural conditions, tend to lead to people believing in things for which there is no evidence.

The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.