“I am very sensible what a weakness and presumption it is, to reason ag...” — Jonathan Swift Quote

“I am very sensible what a weakness and presumption it is, to reason against the general humor and disposition of the world.”

“I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.”

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.”

“I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.”

“We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”

“A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.”

“Do you remember his science project, Harry Sue, on the trajectory of spitballs? I tell you, that modest little display taught our students more about physics than I could accomplish in a weeklong unit at the middle school”

“When radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it.”

“Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.”

“A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.”

“I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.”