“No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.”

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.

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.

However, nothing improves by accident, it requires conscious attention. When you are being bombarded by negatives, improvement, growth and success are easy to forget.

When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.

Letters should be easy and natural.

Streetlife serenader never sang on stages, needs no orchestration, melody comes easy, need no vast arrangement to do their harmonizing.

I’m not easy to live with. My wife is a saint.

TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.

If you don’t suffer, you don’t get anything. Nothing easy in life.

I’m the last of the truly tacky women. I do trash with flash and sleaze with ease.