“Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers he...”

“[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.”

“Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.”

“It is no coincidence that so many religious beliefs date back to times when no science could possibly have accounted satisfactorily for many of the natural phenomena inspiring scripture and myths.”

“We're not all equal, it's simply not true. That isn't science.”

“Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.”

“Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”

“As time and space are bent by gravity, so too is truth bent by power.”

“What a curious power words have.”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”

“I am the perfect version of me.”

“But if you tame me, then weshall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, Ishall be unique in all the world.”

“I don't want the world to keep turning without me on it.”