Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.
I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.
Ironically, I originally wrote the tweet with Jews and thought, That might give offense. And so I thought I better change it.
I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'
What's going to happen when I die? I may be buried, or I may be cremated, I may give my body to science. I haven't decided yet.
If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.
[Alternative medicine is defined as] that set of practices that cannot be tested, refuse to be tested or consistently fail tests.
I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misused by somebody with an agenda.
It is universally accepted that an admission of atheism would be instant political suicide for any (U.S.) presidential candidate.
I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.
I've seen [Lalla Ward] episodes of "Doctor Who." They're good, at least partly because the scripts were written by Douglas Adams.
Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.
Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.
The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.
Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to 'move into.'
Don't ask God to cure cancer and world poverty. He's too busy finding you a parking space and fixing the weather for your barbecue.
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
With respect to those meanings of 'human' that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig.
Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don't know the Ten Commandments.
As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.
To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.
Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
There are very interesting controversies within evolution; however, whether evolution occurs is not one of them. It definitely does.
But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You're not allowed to criticise it.
Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker.
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.
God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer.
One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.
Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.
Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?
You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.
It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests.
Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward? That's not morality, that's just sucking up.
When I sign books, I get lines of people and what they usually say is: "Thank you. You have changed my life." I am really moved by that.
How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.
Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism.
When the ancestors of the cheetah first began pursuing the ancestors of the gazelle, neither of them could run as fast as they can today.
You can legally lie about the real world to your heart's content, but until some human being is materially damaged, nobody will complain.
Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.
Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.
If circumcision has any justification AT ALL, it should be medical only. Parents' religion is the worst of all reasons - pure child abuse.
I might respect you as a brilliant intellect, runner, musician or juggler. But respect your BELIEFS? Only if they're supported by evidence.
The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors.
The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.