“Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private revelation.”

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

The majority of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all.

It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.

I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.

You can make some inferences about a man’s character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.

Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.

Let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.

The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

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

Why, I can’t help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.

Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation.

I’m one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.

Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand.

Envy is blind, and is only clever in depreciating the virtues of others.

All things will be clear and distinct to the man who does not hurry; haste is blind and improvident.

Two kinds of blindness are easily combined so that those who do not see really appear to see what is not.

Do not take a blind guide.

Some men make fortunes, but not to enjoy them for, blinded by avarice, they live to make fortunes.

Seeing is better than being blind, even when seeing hurts.