“I will judge you on how you treat the least powerful. So there.”

Respect people with less power then you. I don’t care if you’re the most powerful cat in the room,

Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just THIS?

Take them out onto the verandah and beat them with a cricket bat…. Be intellectually rigorous. Identify your biases, your prejudices, your privilege.

Science is not a body of knowledge or a belief system, it is just a term that describes humankind’s incremental acquisition of understanding through observation.

It is just a term which describes humankind’s incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome.

Love without evidence is stalking.

It’s the fine balance of caffeine and alcohol that bookends my days

There is great wisdom in this… but I would add that opinions differ significantly from arse-holes, in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.

The existence of a higher power with any consciousness or interest in the human race or ability to punish or reward humans for their moral choices or that there is any reason other than fear to believe in any version of an afterlife, I will give you my piano, one of my legs and my wife.

If I had a religion, its deity would be Audysseus, the sound God, and He would be a vengeful god, dishing out eternal damnation to people with cheap stage monitors.

Empathy is intuitive, but it is also something you can work on intellectually.

Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex wonderfully unfathomable world?

Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be NOT magic.

There are children in Africa, starving to death, and you don’t hear them whinging.

Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed.

To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.

The dog [in Pavlov’s experiments] does not continue to salivate whenever it hears a bell unless sometimes at least an edible offering accompanies the bell.

The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead.

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols

At least 50 times. I’ve jumped off a building, jumped off a cliff in a car. I’ve been in bedrooms when women came in with knives and guns.

An experience associated only once with a bereavement, an accident, or a battle, may become the center of a permanent phobia or complex, not in the least dependent on a recurrence of the original shock.

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

One of the principles we teach in our programs is “If you shoot for the stars, you’ll at least hit the moon.” Poor people don’t even shoot for the ceiling in their house, and then they wonder why they’re not successful.

Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.