“Most Americans have negative perceptions of atheists, and antiatheist prejudice is more prevalent than antipathy toward Muslims (which comes in second place), African Americans, LGBQT individuals, Jews, or Mormons.”

“We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to this moment.”

“While change happens, we do not freely choose to change; instead, we are changed buy the world around us.”

“Much has been made of the hospitality, conservatism (as in strictly conserving cultural norms), and violence of the traditional culture of honor of the American South. The pattern of violence tells a ton: murders in the South, which typically has the highest rates in the country, are not about stickups gone wrong in a city; they’re about murdering someone who has seriously tarnished your honor (by conspicuously bad-mouthing you, failing to repay a debt, coming on to your significant other…), particularly if living in a rural area.”
“You can’t successfully believe something different from what you believe.”

“Why did that moment just occur? “Because of what came before it.” They why did *that* moment just occur? “Because of what came before that,” forever, isn’t absurd and is, instead, how the universe works. […] In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. […] All that came before, with its varying flavors of uncontrollable luck, is what came to *constitute* you. This is how you became you.”

“By age three, your average high-socioeconomic status kid has heard about thirty million more words at home than a poor kid.”

“‘Free will’ is what we call the biology that we don’t understand on a predictive level yet, and when we do understand it, it stops being free will. […] We do something, carry out a behavior, and we *feel* like we’ve chosen, that there is a Me inside separate from all those neurons.”

“We are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control — our biology, our environment, their interactions. […]Try as we might, we can’t will ourselves to have more willpower.”

“We don’t *change* our minds. Our minds, which are the end products of all the biological moments that came before, are *changed* by circumstances around us.”

“What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. There’s no answer to “Why?” beyond “This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe in which, occasionally, atoms come together temporarily to form things we each call Me.”

“Depression is the pathological loss of the capacity to rationalize away reality.”