Christopher Hitchens was a great warrior, a magnificent orator, a pugilist and a gentleman. He was kind, but he took no prisoners when arguing with idiots.

Discrimination is not liberal. Arguing against discrimination is not intolerance.

Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.

Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma. They end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs when, if you, they just gave, you gave, treatment early, and they got some treatment, and uhhh a breathalyzer, or uhh, an inhalator, not a breathalyzer...

We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You're not allowed to criticise it.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.