“As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.”

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.

Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.

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

True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don’t have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things.

Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.

We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.

I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.

The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.

The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.

Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.

In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.

Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

Self-seeking is self-destruction.

One arrow alone can be easily broken but many arrows are indestructible.

Don’t Look For the Finish Line. The Journey Itself Is The Destination.

Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester’s cap and bells.

Don’t ever underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission.

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us.

Great nations do not succumb through lost wars, but rather through racial decay and the destruction of their internal order.

All she built had fallen apart it’s OK she believed destruction was art.