“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.”

Science is the poetry of reality.

The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.

Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime.

The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book.

American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.

Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life.

I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.

Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.

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

Being an atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily, and fully.

The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened.

An Experiment, like every other event which takes place, is a natural phenomenon; but in a Scientific Experiment the circumstances are so arranged that the relations between a particular set of phenomena may be studied to the best advantage.

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

Indians, of course, have no “theology,” and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.

A man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules.

And then I’ll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.

The thing that interests me far more than anything is creating music, songwriting and arranging, and in that context drumming itself is a means to an end.