Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.

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.

The child has no way of knowing what's good information.

If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.

There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.

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.

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.

Public sharing is an important part of science.

If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.

There is something cheap about magic that works just because it is magic.

In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

I'm pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.

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.

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.

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.

I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.

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.

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.

Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things, too.

I'm not a good observer. I'm not proud of it.

A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.

I don't think that it's up to government to dictate what people should wear.

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'm afraid the Internet is filled with people using really very intemperate language.