Richard Dawkins

I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear about it in medicine and nursing. It's a lawyer-driven insistence on meeting prescribed standards rather than just being a good doctor.

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They don't have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.

Segregation has no place in the education system.

Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.

I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I'm ignorant of lots of things. Ignorance is something that can be remedied by education.

Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.

There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.

When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.

The Bible was written by fallible human beings.

Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection.

You can legally lie about the real world to your heart's content, but until some human being is materially damaged, nobody will complain.