“Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.”

When I was 14 a chaplain at school gave me a reading list. I read everything and I went back to him with a question: how can you really believe in this stuff?

Nothing is truly unnatural, because everything that exists, including human intelligence, is a product of nature. If human intelligence can devise ways for the genes from two men to result in a child, their doing so is an entirely natural event.

Try lighting your house by prayer instead of electricity and see which one works.

And I say, the meaning of life is what you make it. There will be as many different meaningful lives as there are people to live them.

To believe something in the face of evidence and against reason – to believe something by faith – is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect.

The wise say that our failure is to form habits: for habit is the mark of a stereotyped world.

Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person’s broad mind and narrow waist change places.

Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.

Religion and science have a common ancestor – ignorance.

Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.

Humanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life.

I do not believe that there are any such things as gods and goddesses, for exactly the same reasons as I do not believe there are fairies, goblins or sprites, and these reasons should be obvious to anyone over the age of ten.

Look at the blogosphere – the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration.

It takes a certain ingenuous faith – but I have it – to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.

I despise people who depend on these things [heroin and cocaine]. If you really want a mind-altering experience, look at a tree.

It doesn’t have to be the Grand Canyon, it could be a city street, it could be the face of another human being – Everything is full of wonder.