Richard Dawkins: “My colleague takes the view that this [young-earth creationist] is entitled to a job as a professor of astronomy, because he keeps his private beliefs to himself while at work. I take the opposite view. I would object to employing him, on the grounds that his research papers, and his lectures to students, are filled with what he personally believes to be falsehoods. He is a fake, a fraud, a charlatan, drawing a salary for a job that could have gone to an honest astronomer. Moreover, I would regard his equanimity in holding two diametrically opposing views simultaneously in his head as a revealing indicator that there is something wrong with his head.”

“The mark of superior people, in Ortega’s sense, is that they consider themselves inferior to what they may become. Self-improvement, for all that it smacks of the self-help shelf at Barnes & Noble, is also, in this way, the rallying cry of the only kind of elite worth having.
…
The resentful right, under the banner — hoisted alike by Beck, Huckabee, and Palin — of common sense, flatters deprivation as wisdom by implying to the uneducated that an education isn’t worth having. The violence this bigoted proposition has done to the talents and capacities of millions of people is incalculable, unforgivable.”

A book about how difficult it is to photograph a black dog.

“Julian Assange’s extremely weird version of dissident “living in truth” doesn’t bear much relationship to the way that public life has ever been arranged. It does, however, align very closely to what we’ve done to ourselves by inventing and spreading the Internet. If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn’t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does.”