'No man -prince, peasant, pope, -has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!'

'There are a few of us -madmen all! -who are in love with knowing, who would sell the last shirt from our backs for one small truth, one tiny star-fire to ligh…

'Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!'

'If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.'

You waste the attention of your eyes, the glittering labour of your hands, and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves of which you'll taste not a morsel; …

We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.

'If we are honest-and scientists have to be-we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a pr…