I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that’s their gift.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.

My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

The capacity of the female mind for studies of the highest order cannot be doubted, having been sufficiently illustrated by its works of genius, of erudition, and of science.

No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

Commonsense is the realised sense of proportion.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it’s egotism.

The less you know, the more you believe.

God doesn’t dwell in the wooden, stony or earthen idols. His abode is in our feelings, our thoughts.

The American doctor, in my opinion, possesses a combination of conservatism and that other quality which has put the United States in the forefront in almost every department of science – that is, an eagerness to know what it is really all about in order that he may not be the one left behind if there is something to it.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

I never wanted to be a scientist per se. I wanted to be a naturalist.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

The way I define ‚intelligent design‘ is that when people started out, we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Your daily life is your temple and your religion. When you enter into it take with you your all.

If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.

Jesus isn’t lettin‘ you off the hook. The Scriptures don’t let you off the hook so easily… When people say, you know, ‚Good teacher‘, ‚Prophet‘, ‚Really nice guy‘ … this is not how Jesus thought of Himself.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

Next to religion, baseball has had a greater impact on our American way of life than any other American institution.

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise.

I’m a Christian – I really don’t believe in UFOs.

It’s very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can’t imagine.

When you become a Christian, something truly amazing happens: God comes to live inside your heart. You become the home of God.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don’t want to get malaria.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.

As scientists, we step on the shoulders of science, building on the work that has come before us – aiming to inspire a new generation of young scientists to continue once we are gone.

I’m actually starting to like more and more people who have convictions that are unpopular.

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race – racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic – what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.

Before the throne of the Almighty, man will be judged not by his acts but by his intentions. For God alone reads our hearts.

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

I hope I would not be so arrogant as to doubt anyone’s religion or belief.

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it’s perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

You know, my faith is one that admits some doubt.

All religions and all communities have the same rights, and it is my responsibility to ensure their complete and total protection. My government will not tolerate or accept any discrimination based on caste, creed and religion.

I’m a religious woman. And I feel I have responsibility. I have no modesty at all. I’m even afraid of it – it’s a learned affectation and it’s just stuck on me like decals. Now I pray for humility because that comes from inside out.

I’m a Christian by choice.

Gold was a gift to Jesus. If it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!

It’s hard for me to grasp the concept of somebody being nervous when I’m talking to them.

The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

Saying nothing… sometimes says the most.

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.