In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible.

But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.

Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.

The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.

Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.

The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science - or any honest intellectual inquiry.

... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.