Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.

I'm not politically correct.

In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered OK for kids to play with weird things. We could go to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse.

Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

Science grows like a weed every year.

Here's a bunch of people practising a new set of behavioural norms. Apparently it didn't work because a lot of them got sick. That's the conclusion. You don't necessarily know why it happened. But you start there.

We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire.

We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.

It's not blaming the victim. It's not anybody's fault. They just did something that didn't work, that's all.

Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.

I can say exactly what I feel about any issue, and I'm going to do that.

Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this.

PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV.

The horror of it is, every goddamn thing you look at seems pretty scary to me.

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

They can't pooh-pooh me now, because of who I am.

The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.

Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.

People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so.

My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.

Sometimes in the morning, when it's a good surf, I go out there, and I don't feel like it's a bad world.

Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess.

People realize this man knows what the hell's going on and nobody else does.

I'm really optimistic in the mornings.

I like writing about biology, not doing it.

I love a microphone and a big crowd; I'm an entertainer, I guess.

If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen.

My grandfather milked several cows twice a day and supplied the neighbours with dairy products. He liked to go visiting around the county on Saturdays, and he also enjoyed the neighbours when they came by once a week with their empty milk jars. He walked them out to their cars and hung over the driver's side window until they drove off.

Scientists are doing an awful lot of damage to the world in the name of helping it. I don't mind attacking my own fraternity because I am ashamed of it.

You can't ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket.

You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.

Natural DNA is a tractless coil like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of the car in the dark.

Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin.

My theory is if you have a religion, it's a good one. Because some people don't have any at all.

We aim in the domain of politics at republicanism; in the domain of economics at socialism; in the domain of what is today called religion, at atheism.

As for the Devil - that is somebody our religion tried to do without for a long time.

Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.

There is one thing higher than Royalty: and that is religion, which causes us to leave the world, and seek God.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.

I don't have a religion. I believe in a God. I don't know what it looks like but it's MY god. My own interpretation of the supernatural.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

Toleration is the best religion.

Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion.

From the long range point of view, I do not know of anything we can do more important than to make some contribution to the preservation of religion as a vital force in America.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.