Even if 'going retrograde' or 'moving into Aquarius' were real phenomena, something that planets actually do, what influence could they possibly have on human events? A planet is so far away that its gravitational pull on a new-born baby would be swamped by the gravitational pull of the doctor's paunch.
— Richard Dawkins
I've always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.
There are quite a lot of YouTube clips of me that have gone viral. One that I think of is of a young woman at a lecture I was giving - she came from Liberty University, which is a ludicrous religious institution. She said, 'What if you are wrong?' and I answered that rather briefly, and that's gone viral.
Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals, and to me that's crystal-clear.
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.
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.
The very idea of supernatural magic - including miracles - is incoherent, devoid of sensible meaning.
A good scientific theory is one which is falsifiable, which has not been falsified.
I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.
Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.
I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.
I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.
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.
How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.
My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.
My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.
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.'
There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter, and it's actually quite an elegant art reducing what you have to say to 140 characters, and it's something that I quite enjoy attempting to do.
In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I did actually use the metaphor of a 'virus.' So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.
I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.
Publishers like a good buzz, and negative responses sell books just as well as positive ones.
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.
The supernatural is ubiquitous in children's entertainment, from Grimm and Hans Andersen to Disney and 'Harry Potter.'
In Britain, Christianity is dying. Islam, unfortunately, isn't.
People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design.
I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I'm ignorant of lots of things. Ignorance is something that can be remedied by education.
Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they're not foolish enough to believe that it's because of faith that they get good exam results.
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.
An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.
Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.
I don't think that it's up to government to dictate what people should wear.
There are many very educated people who are religious, but they're not creationists.
A universe with a creator would be a totally different kind of universe, scientifically speaking, than one without.
We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humouring it as a piece of harmless fun.
I'm afraid the Internet is filled with people using really very intemperate language.
The child has no way of knowing what's good information.
I did a film that's on YouTube of me reading hate mail with a woman playing the cello in the background.
The Bible was written by fallible human beings.
Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to suggest that he might capriciously and arbitrarily violate them in order to walk on water, or turn water into wine as a cheap party trick at a wedding?
All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place.
Notoriously, the United States is the most religious of the Western advanced nations. It's a bit mysterious why that is.
I would like to find a way in which people in Saudi Arabia could learn that they can be something other than a Muslim. Some people may not realize this. Of course, there is the problem that you can get in trouble or get stoned.
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 guess the Democrats have to pretend to be more pious than the Republicans because they are under suspicion of not being.
There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about, it would come from a scientist, and not an idiot.
If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.
I've never been the sort of firebrand that I've been made out to be. I'm actually quite a mild person.
From a Darwinian perspective, it is clear what pain is doing. It's a warning: 'Don't do that again.' If you burn yourself, you're never going to pick up a live coal again.
