"I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things."

"Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility."

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."

"I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history."

"I mean, there's a hell of a lot of grounds for protest, but you don't do it through music."

"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars."

"There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."

"Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it."