“Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.”

To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant — inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.

Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any resolution.

You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.

The mind is the effect, not the cause.

In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all.

The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.

Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.

Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about – about what the issues really are – and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.

There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.

What you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.

I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be “informavores”, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.

You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!

What if last time felt so beautiful simply because it actually was our last time?

When you run out of love, it’s really hard to understand whether you have lost your heart or your heart has lost you.

I’m an athlete and I’m black, and a lot of black athletes go broke. I do not want to become a statistic, so maybe I overcompensate. But I’m paranoid. Oprah told me a long time ago, ‘You sign every check. Never let anyone sign any checks.’

I built bridges that never once led me back to you. I just didn’t realize you were the one breaking them.

The Love in your eyes will forever hold a glimpse of me.

Sticks and stones break bones but words ferment like poison. A slow, painful death.

I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended from Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me.

Remember how the first world war broke out. It broke out as a result of the desire to redivide the world.