“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 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.

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.

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

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.

Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility.

Religious faith, is a state of mind, that leads people to believe in something, it doesn’t matter what, without a whisper of doubt, or a whiff of evidence, and believe so strongly in some cases, that they are prepare to kill and die for it, without the need for further justification.

Her persona may be quiet, but her observation loud.

Cry Baby is a character so I think that the next album is going to be about a specific thing in her life or another place in her world. It’s going to be a bit deeper into a bigger picture.

Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are, to some extent, a gift. Good character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it, piece by piece – by thought, choice, courage, and determination.

Every character, when it comes to a cinematic representation, gets complicated and layered. You are given a lot of dimensions than a single dimension to an individual. That’s the main difference between seeing something out of the window and seeing something on screen.

Eventually I realized that Cry Baby was a character that was based off of me, and that we had a lot of similarities.

Education must be orientated towards the attainment of character for leading clean simple lives.

We see through others only when we see through ourselves.

Thought creates character.