Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I want to be remembered most as a writer – one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.
Now I’m a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.
Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological.
All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.
We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 – and half the things he knows at 40 hadn’t been discovered when he was 20?
Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference we should each be treated with appropriate respect.
If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run-and often in the short one-the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
This is the first age that’s ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn’t require religion at all.
Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of god a pretty good definition of insanity?
Getting information from the internet is like getting a glass of water from the Niagara Falls.
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.