“This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.”

Willing to try to get a better atmosphere through a demonstration of democratic principles, fairness and cooperation, a better product, those will win in the end.

Persist! The world needs all you can give.

The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

There is no better high than discovery.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.

Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago.

Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.

We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It’s about conflicts between creation stories.

Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.

Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we’re hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.

The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.