“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation.”

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.

Why, I can’t help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private revelation.

Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.

Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility.

Religious faith, is a state of mind, that leads people to believe in something, it doesn’t matter what, without a whisper of doubt, or a whiff of evidence, and believe so strongly in some cases, that they are prepare to kill and die for it, without the need for further justification.

Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It’s a sort of crime against childhood.

Our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.

Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.

We shouldn’t just celebrate the labor of our workers. We should pay them a decent wage.

God’s most lordly gift to man is decency of mind.

God’s most lordly gift to man is decency of mind.

I am losing all sense of decency.

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.

There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.

It is no use to preach to children if you do not act decently yourself.

The job is interesting, and the task is difficult, but the man is just a decent man doing a very ordinary job.