“The most serious problem facing humankind is climate change. All of these people breathing and burning our atmosphere has led to an extraordinarily dangerous situation.”

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 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.

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.

How to sustain the miracle Of being, that like a muted bell, Or like some ocean-breathing shell, Quivers, intense and still?

WE HAVE SEEN that hunger and breathing are desires of the body. There are other desires that are not of the body, but again man seldom pauses to observe these desires in himself.

Passion is not a quality that is foreign to you. It is not a characteristic that some people are born with and some must do without. To be passionate is as natural to you as breathing, as natural as being alive. It is the source of who you are.

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.

Zazen is an activity that is an extension of the universe. Zazen is not the life of an individual, it’s the universe that’s breathing.

I gasp, pressing both palms to my chest. Now the monstrous thing has its claws around my throat, squeezing my airway. I twist and put my head between my knees, breathing until the strangled feeling leaves me.

He gave her such gifts – not the kind that were put in boxes, but the sort that filled her with imagination, breathing indescribable happiness into her life.

Sometimes survival simply looks like breathing.