1. “If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.”
2. “Segregation has no place in the education system.”
3. “Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”
4. “A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.”
5. “Natural selection will remove ignorance from future generations.”
6. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”
7. “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 colors”
8. “By all means let’s be open minded, but not so open- minded that our brains drop out.”
9. “It’s a difficult business, finding out what’s true about the world, the universe.”
10. “Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.”
11. “Public sharing is an important part of science.”
12. “Mystics exult in mystery and want to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.”
13. “Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.”
14. “A good theory explains a lot but postulates little.”
15. “I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.”
16. “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
17. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”
18. “The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.”
19. “Natural selection is anything but random.”
20. “Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous foly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.”
21. “We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.”
22. “Words are not trivial. They matter because they raise consciousness.”
23. “Islands are natural workshops of evolution.”
24. “People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design.”
25. “Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.”
26. “Discrimination is not liberal. Arguing against discrimination is not intolerance.”
27. “Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do.”
28. “What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.”
29. “Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.”
30. “Evolution never looks to the future.”
