Peter

“Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

“If the universe has any purpose more important than topping a woman you love and making a baby with her hearty help, I've never heard of it.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

“If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way. The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition. From this, of course, it does not follow that you can explain the existence of entities as complex as man by exactly the same principles on their own. It is no good taking the right number of atoms and shaking them together with some external energy till they happen to fall into the right pattern, and out drops Adam!”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“one of the few things I’ve learned is that humans hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn—when they do, which isn’t often—on their own, the hard way.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love