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.

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.

I can handle heckling on evolution because it's my own field.

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.