“I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.”

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.

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

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.

I like the rough impersonality of New York … Human relations are oiled by jokes, complaints, and confessions-all made with the assumption of never seeing the other person again.

Sometimes I’m just as prejudiced as people I point fingers at. And that’s not right. How can I look at white skin and make assumptions but not want assumptions made about me? That’s not right.

Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer.

You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.

You don’t even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one’s total orientation to life.

The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.