“Where we have strong emotions, we’re liable to fool ourselves.”

When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.

One of the greatest gifts adults can give – to their offspring and to their society – is to read to children.

I’ve always thought an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.

Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.

What an astonishing thing a book is.

We all have a thirst for wonder. It’s a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it.

To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.

And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.

Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

You know, they are fooling us, there is no God.

Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism. Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.

Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom.

Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism.

Atheism is a strange thing. Even the devils never fell into that vice.

I believe BECAUSE it’s impossible.

The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.