“I used to play ultimate Frisbee, and I just got a reputation for making popcorn at parties. I don’t mean to brag on myself, but I make the popcorn in the pot, and it comes out fine every time.”

You start doing the addictive behavior to feel good and then your receptors get overloaded with dopamine, then you stop doing the addictive thing and some of the receptors have shut down and you don’t have enough dopamine to feel good.

That’s what makes a human a human, if we store information outside our bodies.

Talk about science with everyone you meet. Especially talk about climate change. It needs to become a part of our everyday conversation (the way it is everywhere else in the world).

One of the drawbacks of English is you can’t spell things by hearing them.

I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, that’s completely inconsistent with the world we observe, that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it. Because we need them.

There are just two people entitled to refer to themselves as “we”; one is the editor and the other is the fellow with a tapeworm.

Educated women have fewer kids. And the kids they do have are better cared for and are more successful. As I like to say, it’s not one thing that we need to focus on. It’s everything all at once.

If you have this idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old, you are denying, if you will, everything that you can touch and see. Youre not paying attention to whats happening in the universe around you.

I understand that you take the Bible, as written in English, translated many many times over the last three millennia as to be a more accurate, more reasonable assessment of the natural laws we see around us than what I and everybody in here can observe. That, to me, is unsettling.

We are part of the process; we are the exquisite result of billions of years of natural research and development.

I’ll admit that the discovery of evolution is humbling, but it is also empowering. It transforms our relationship to the life around us. Instead of being outsiders watching the natural world go by, we are insiders.

Evolution is a theory, and it’s a theory that you can test. We’ve tested evolution in many ways. You can’t present good evidence that says evolution is not a fact.

I feel that I’ve often pointed out that there are countless aspects of life and nature that scientists and scientific thinkers cannot explain.

Our goal in science is to discover universal laws of nature. If one’s faith requires one to abandon or ignore natural laws, well, that person is going to have trouble reconciling religion and science. Otherwise, there is no any conflict.

Science is the best thing humans beings have ever come up with. And if it isn’t, science will fix it.

Humor is everywhere in that there’s irony in just about anything a human does.

The main thing that I learned from my horrible job experiences was how horrible they were.

I mean, it’s hard to talk about death without realizing that’s our end too, right? I am constantly aware of death.

As I said in my last book, birds are mean. They’re the only pet that, when they escape, the owners are relieved. You can tell a species is evil by doing this simple math.

A problem is something you can do something about. If you can’t do something about it, then it’s not a problem, it’s a predicament. That means it’s something that must be coped with, endured.

There are two kinds of people in the world – those who have a horror of a vacuum and those with a horror of the things that fill it. Translated into domestic interiors, this means people who live with, and without, clutter.

It’s not that I want to be, but it’s a fascination of the mind and it plays a role in why I want to live my life a certain way.

I’m always telling my students that the weirdest thing is the truth. I mean, the fact that we get up in the morning and put on clothes is weird.

… we have gratefully to receive from the hand of God the institution of the state with its magistrates as a means of preservation….