“Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn’t kept pace.”

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.

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.

What you can imagine depends on what you know.

There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

Freedom does not mean that right to do whatever we please, but rather to do as we ought. The right to do whatever we please reduces freedom to a physical power and forgets that freedom is a moral power.

So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you.

Money is not good or evil. It has no morals or intentions on its own. Money reflects the character of the user.

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

Optimism is the true moral courage.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

To be loved is very demoralizing.