Shay

“Evolution, or its driving engine natural selection, has no foresight. In every generation within every species, the individuals best equipped to survive and reproduce contribute more than their fair share of genes to the next generation. The consequence, blind as it is, is the nearest approach to foresight that nature permits. [...] It is always tinkering: here shrinking a bit, there expanding a bit, constantly adjusting, putting on and taking off, optimising immediate reproductive success. Survival in future centuries doesn’t enter into the calculation, for the good reason that it isn’t really a calculation at all. It all happens automatically, as some genes survive in the gene pool and others don’t.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

“Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

“In order to indoctrinate their followers and secure obedience, religions frequently tear people down, creating an emptiness that must then be filled with Jesus, Allah or any other deity. People are told that they are inherently bad or sinful and that the only way to become good is by giving over control of their lives to faith. As there is no evidence that any of that is true, religion, in effect, is creating an imaginary problem simply so that it can sell an imaginary solution.”
― Armin Navabi, Why There Is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God

“Men ask for health in their prayers to the gods: they do not realize that the power to achieve it lies in themselves. Lacking self-control, they perform contrary actions and betray health to their desires.”
― Democritus