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

Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Science is the poetry of reality.

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.

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.

The essence of leadership is building bonds of trust in your organization.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

The essence of tyranny is the enforcement of stupid laws.

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

Trust is the essence of Leadership.

The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.

Don’t forget who you are and where you come from.

That, in its essence, is Fascism — ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.