Alan

“It’s time to quit fucking around, don’t you know that? When you start to see colored footprints on the sidewalk, it’s time to quit fucking around and go to the doctor.”
― Stephen King, Insomnia

“theistic equivalent of slapstick or a clumsy God or perhaps one sneezing or kicking up a pebble—can account considerably better for our present situation than can an intentional act of Creation. The humanlike God we’re prone to worshipping could be a long-dead intergalactic sea horse that, rooting through an ancient seabed for plankton in some unknown dimension, incidentally dislodged the one grain of sand that held all of our own infinite cosmos intact.”
― Jesse Bering, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life

“Part of running a successful tyranny is knowing when and how to let your subjects off the leash”
― Richard K. Morgan, Woken Furies

“It is said that science has presented humans with three hammer blows to its sense of self-importance. Copernicus taught us that the Earth was not at the centre of the universe; Freud showed us that our instincts are emotional and sexual rather than rational and godly; and Darwin demonstrated that we were descended not from angels but from apes. To this we might add the gene-centred view of life which shows that in many cases we are not the final beneficiaries of our own behaviour; the buck stops not with us but our genes.”
― Lance Workman, Evolutionary Psychology: An Introduction