Belief does not change what is.
Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.
If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.
Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.
Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent.
Darwin's principle of natural selection leads to the prediction that the proper way to analyze any evolutionary development is to see the new features as adaptive to environments. And that's a perfectly good principle. The problem is that there are many evolutionary biologists who view everything that happens in evolution as directly evolved for adaptive benefit. And that just doesn't work. Whenever you build a structure for adaptive reasons, the structure is going to exhibit properties that have nothing to do with adaptation. They're just side consequences.
The idea of authority, and therefore the respect for authority, is an anti-Semitic notion. It is in Catholicism, in Christianity, in the very teachings of Jesus that it finds at once its lay and its religious consecration.
I cried myself to sleep wishing I was ugly because men leered and disrespected me, because they assumed things about my mental capacity or my physical willingness based on the way I look.
I used to live in a room full of mirrors; all I could see was me. I take my spirit and I crash my mirrors, now the whole world is here for me to see.
I had a goal, I had a dream. . . and at the end of the day no matter what people say to you as long as YOU know who you are as a person NOTHING else in the world matters.