While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales.
We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
I promise to question everything my leaders tell me. I promise to use my critical faculties. I promise to develop my independence of thought. I promise to educate myself so I can make my own judgments.
Not all bits have equal value.
The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they’ve made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we’re in deep trouble.
When permitted to listen to alternative opinions and engage in substantive debate, people have been known to change their minds. It can happen.
There is in this Universe much of what seems to be design.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.
Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.
Where did God come from? If we decide this is an unanswerable question why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question.
By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.
Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.
In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work.
If we ruin the earth, there is no place else to go.
Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse.
Nothing disturbs me more than the glorification of stupidity.
The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed.
We humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical.
But our preferences do not determine what’s true.
One of the great commandments of science is: ‘Mistrust arguments from authority.’