As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.
— Richard Dawkins
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.
Beauty arises out of human inspiration.
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.
Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.
I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things.
The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world.
Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.
Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle.
George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.
Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do.
The feminists taught us about consciousness-raising.
God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.
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.
Anybody who has something sensible or worthwhile to say should be able to say it calmly and soberly, relying on the words themselves to convey his meaning, without resorting to yelling.
To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham.
Christopher Hitchens was a great warrior, a magnificent orator, a pugilist and a gentleman. He was kind, but he took no prisoners when arguing with idiots.
I like to think 'The God Delusion' is a humorous book. I think, actually, it's full of laughs. And people who describe it as a polarizing book or as an aggressive book, it's just that very often they haven't read it.
What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?
We have a huge amount of DNA in common with jellyfish.
I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn't going to change their mind.
To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.
I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.
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.
People like to trace their ancestry.
Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.
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.
A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.'
If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.
If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.
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.
Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.
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.
Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake up, highly convincing. Most of us have had experiences which are verging on hallucination. It shows the power of the brain to knock up illusions.
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?'
Teachers who help to open young minds perform a duty which is as near sacred as I will admit.
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.
When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.
Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.
There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.
In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous - though, of course, they would not have used that phrase.
The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.
Words are not trivial. They matter because they raise consciousness.
Don't kid yourself that you're going to live again after you're dead; you're not. Make the most of the one life you've got. Live it to the full.
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.
The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will provoke violent strife between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between Iraqis in general and the American occupation forces.
Islands are natural workshops of evolution.
