Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.
If saying that religion should be a private matter and should not have special influence in public life is illiberal, then 74% of U.K. Christians are illiberal, too.
Placebos work.
I'm not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship.
I can handle heckling on evolution because it's my own field.
In Britain, you don't usually learn about evolution until you are about 15. I should have thought that you should start at about 8. But I could be wrong about that.
In the World Wars, people were perfectly able to shoot other people just because they belonged to the wrong country, without ever asking what their opinions were. Faith too is like that.
Teachers who help to open young minds perform a duty which is as near sacred as I will admit.
I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn't going to change their mind.
I don't actually think 'The Selfish Gene' is a very good title. I think that's one of my worst titles.
The state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote, while at the same time consigning the non-religious to political oblivion.
I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.
When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.
Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.
The feminists taught us about consciousness-raising.
Either Jesus had a father, or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it.
I'm afraid the Internet is filled with people using really very intemperate language.
Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.
I don't think that it's up to government to dictate what people should wear.
A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.
I'm not a good observer. I'm not proud of it.
Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things, too.
Science coverage could be improved by the recognition that science is timeless, and therefore science stories should not need to be pegged to an item in the news.
It's an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical - it is in any animal merely statistical - not deterministic.
I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.
Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know.
Don't feel embarrassed if you've never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name, either.
It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.
I'm pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.
In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.
