Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language.

The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.

We have the ability to completely change our environment to go... to take on... to inherit, in a certain sense, things far beyond our DNA, and that's inheritable. And we can see evolution in action as our ideas evolve and undergo a kind of Darwinian selection not at the DNA level. And we can go off into space.

If you can't relax during your interview, then nothing you do to prepare will matter. Being yourself is essential to the selection process, and interviewers will feel it if you're too nervous. Showing fear or anxiety appears weak compared to a relaxed smile and genuine confidence.

I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.

Yes, you tend to lose patience but selection is not in your hands. All you can do is perform, perform and perform and that's what I enjoy doing.

It's better to enjoy life - selection is a temporary thing.

In a knowledge economy, natural selection favors organizations that can most effectively harness and coordinate collective intellectual energy and creative capacity.

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

It wasn't that the teachers were bad. From what I can remember, they were pretty good. It was about the selection of books. It was about not seeing my young life reflected back to me: my family dynamics, the noise and complexities of my neighborhood, the things I loved, like ice cream trucks and Kool-Aid.

Leaders talk about gender equality but it is not seen during selection of candidates. They will talk about winnability and a woman candidate seldom fulfils the criteria unless she is from a political family.

I see humanity now as one vast plant, needing for its highest fulfillment only love, the natural blessings of the great outdoors, and intelligent crossing and selection.

An education system where student selection is based on credit capacity and not merit capacity and where graduating students are no longer indebted to the nation, but increasingly indebted to the Australian Taxation Office - that's no way to improve the quality of education.

Proponents of intelligent design don't accept that some of the very complex nanomachines that we have inside ourselves could have come about solely on the basis of natural selection.

Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.

Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.

Every day, hundreds of observations and experiments pour into the hopper of the scientific literature. Many of them don't have much to do with evolution - they're observations about the details of physiology, biochemistry, development, and so on - but many of them do. And every fact that has something to do with evolution confirms its truth. Every fossil that we find, every DNA molecule that we sequence, every organ system that we dissect, supports the idea that species evolved from common ancestors. Despite innumerable possible observations that could prove evolution untrue, we don't have a single one. We don't find mammals in Precambrian rocks, humans in the same layers as dinosaurs, or any other fossils out of evolutionary order. DNA sequencing supports the evolutionary relationships of species originally deduced from the fossil record. And, as natural selection predicts, we find no species with adaptations that only benefit a different species. We do find dead genes and vestigial organs, incomprehensible under the idea of special creation. Despite a million chances to be wrong, evolution always comes up right. That is as close as we can get to a scientific truth.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.

There was one question, however, which Inciarte had asked him and he could not answer. Why was it that he had lived while others had died? What purpose had God in making this selection? What sense could be made out of it? 'None,' replied Father Andr?s. 'There are times when the will of God cannot be understood by our human intelligence. There are things which in all humility we must accept as a mystery.

The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.

Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection tribe competing against tribe and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness of virtue and sin among the members of a society.