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.
There is something cheap about magic that works just because it is magic.
If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.
Public sharing is an important part of science.
I think it's misleading to use a word like 'God' in the way Einstein did. I'm sorry that Einstein did. I think he was asking for trouble, and he certainly was misunderstood.
There's branches of science which I don't understand; for example, physics. It could be said, I suppose, that I have faith that physicists understand it better than I do.
There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.
If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.
The child has no way of knowing what's good information.
People really, really hate their religion being criticized. It's as though you've said they had an ugly face; they seem to identify personally with it.
Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.
There's clearly a lot of Ludditism, and you see it in all the hysteria about every scientific story.
You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.
I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.
As a liberal, I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.
Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection.
I want very much to communicate science to as wide an audience as possible, but not at a cost of dumbing down, and not at a cost in getting things right.
It is immoral to brand children with religion. 'This is a Catholic child.' 'That is a Muslim child.' I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, 'That is a Marxist child.'
I did not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject.
People say I'm shrill and strident.
I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.
It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.
The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft of spiders whose would-be ancestors never mated in the first place.
At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.
The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.
The supernatural is ubiquitous in children's entertainment, from Grimm and Hans Andersen to Disney and 'Harry Potter.'
'What is the purpose of the universe?' is a silly question.
I would like people to appreciate science in the same way they appreciate the arts.
The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It's almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren't that interested in whether Jesus was real.
What's going to happen when I die? I may be buried, or I may be cremated, I may give my body to science. I haven't decided yet.
People like to trace their ancestry.
When a company seeks a new chief executive officer, or a university a new vice-chancellor, enormous trouble is taken to find the best person.
I've always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.
I'm sure Obama is an atheist; I'm sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.
Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism.
I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.
There's a mystical strain in every country, and eclipses are likely to bring that out.
I love words.
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
I didn't know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of Beagle days.
Tortoises can survive for weeks without food or water, easily long enough to float in the Humboldt Current from South America to the Galapagos Islands.
A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to 'move into.'
Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.
Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.
My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.
Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.
Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do.
I wouldn't want to have the thought police going to people's homes, dictating what they teach their children. I don't want to be Big Brotherish. I would hate that.
I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.
I guess the Democrats have to pretend to be more pious than the Republicans because they are under suspicion of not being.
I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.
I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'
Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.
I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.
If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.
It's a difficult business, finding out what's true about the world, the universe.
There are people who try to get atheists to form a sort of atheist church and have atheist community singsongs and things. I don't see the need for that, but if people want to do it, why shouldn't they?
We are a very, very unusual species.
I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things.
Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion.
What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?
Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.
Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.
If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining.
As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.
I did a film that's on YouTube of me reading hate mail with a woman playing the cello in the background.
I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.
Notoriously, the United States is the most religious of the Western advanced nations. It's a bit mysterious why that is.
Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.
I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.
I've never been the sort of firebrand that I've been made out to be. I'm actually quite a mild person.
I think that people in the Bible Belt are far less monolithically religious than many people imagine. There are lots and lots of people who are free-thinking, secularists, or atheists in the so-called Bible Belt.
We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.
