Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.

Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.

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

How did scientists get money in the past? They were either lucky and independently wealthy, like Darwin, or they had patrons, like Galileo. Universities or governments have become patrons only in the last few generations. Many of the great scientists of the past were in debt to their patrons in the same sense that modern scientists are influenced by what their granting agencies want.

[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.

Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.

The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents.