Quotes About Perspective

However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never even be offered life in the first place?

There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting... But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.

In George Bernard Shaw's words, 'The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.

We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious.

Words are our servants, not our masters.

Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.

one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.

when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal force, the truth does not necessarily lie midway between them.

What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.

Mark Twain's dismissal of the fear of death is another: 'I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents. Seize every opportunity to ram it home.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball ninety million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

Rather than propose a new theory or unearth a new fact, often the most important contribution a scientist can make is to discover a new way of seeing old theories or facts.

Go out into a big field with a football and plonk it down to represent the sun. Then walk 25 metres away and drop a peppercorn to represent the Earth's size and its distance from the sun. The moon, to the same scale, would be a pinhead, and it would be only 5 centimetres away from the peppercorn. But the nearest other star, Proxima Centauri, to the same scale, would be another (slightly smaller) football located about … wait for it … six and a half thousand kilometres away!

when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal force, the truth does not necessarily lie midway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong. And that justifies passion on the other side.

If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

Dan Dennett reminds us that the common cold is universal to all human peoples in much the same way as religion is, yet we would not want to suggest that colds benefit us.

Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally 'respected'.

Labelling of children. Children are described as 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' etc. from an early age, and certainly far too early for them to have made up their own minds on what they think about religion.

Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes we find it convenient to use words in different senses.

The reason for this double standard in our scepticism is, quite simply, that we can see and we can't echolocate.

I asked Watson whether he knew many religious scientists today. He replied: 'Virtually none. Occasionally I meet them, and I'm a bit embarrassed [laughs] because, you know, I can't believe anyone accepts truth by revelation.

An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of a tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.