Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Jerry Coyne
182 quotes
“The Woke are after Pinker again, and if he’s called a racist and misogynist, as he is in this latest attempt to demonize him, then nobody is safe. After all, Pinker is a liberal Democrat who’s donated a lot of dosh to the Democratic Party, and relentlessly preaches a message of moral, material, and “well-being” progress that’s been attained through reason and adherence to Enlightenment values. But that sermon alone is enough to render him an Unperson, for the Woke prize narrative and “lived experience” over data, denigrate reason, and absolutely despise the Enlightenment.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Purity Posse pursues Pinker" July 5, 2020
“The GOP, with 100+ of its Congresspeople joining the crazy Texas lawsuit trying to overturn the election, has become a swarming beehive of truthers, conspiracy theorists, and, of course, gun nuts.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Andrew Sullivan implies that the Resurrection probably didn’t happen, and then describes “Christianism” as a big threat to America" December 12, 2020
“Christianity, and religion in general, is dying in America. (The exceptions are an increase in Islam, probably due to immigration, and in Buddhism, a basically godless religion.) The decline is due largely to a loss of faith among young people, as we’ve seen several times before. Religion wanes one corpse at a time.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Christianity and religion in general are dying in America, especially among Hispanics" July 18, 2021
“Isn’t it time for us to stop taking this nonsense seriously? I regard panpsychists as I regard theologians: they both make stuff up, none of what they say is testable, and they both actually get paid to foist nonsense on the world.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Panpsychism again?" November 19, 2021
“If “wokeness” is in some sense equivalent to “making useless performative gestures that at the same time show what a good person you are,” then land acknowledgments are its apogee. They are performances not for Native Americans, but for others who were also complicit in the theft. Put up or shut up. And if you really think you’re responsible for stealing land, give it back—or pay for it.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The On Being Project is located on Dakota Land”" May 22, 2022
“Religion and xenophobia go together like hot dogs and mustard.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Two stray and unpublished comments" June 17, 2022
“But grifters gotta grift, so we’ll always have tarot, psychics, and other scammers.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: PBS touts tarot" August 25, 2022
“A lot of activism, of course, is sincere activism, and I see instances of that all the time. Some of my best friends from college are dedicated to true “social justice”, and have spent their lives doing social work, teaching English to immigrants, deliberately teaching in minority schools, and so on. But what distinguishes “wokeness” from genuine social justice advocates is that the woke are engaged in a performance—usually involved in showing what good people they are, and what a good tribe they belong to.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Chamberlin Rock speaks!" September 24, 2022
“Biblical scholarship is useful as a form of historical inquiry and literary exegesis, while theology is a remnant of our childhood as a species, a vestigial belief that’s the mental equivalent of adults holding blankets and sucking their thumbs.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: I answer an ambiguous question: “Can scientists believe in God?" January 22, 2023
“So because of this one word, used with every intent to be polite, the Easthampton Public Schools lost its best candidate. That’s simply asinine and ridiculous. Look at the tradeoff: they gave away their best candidate so that the word “ladies” could be publicly and eternally demonized. These DEI “experts” should be treated with the ridicule and contempt they deserve.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Man loses job after using the word “ladies”, deemed by DEI experts to be a microaggression" April 7, 2023
“The man has no conception of what empirical evidence really is, so strong is his will to believe.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tish Harrison Warren interviews an Anglican bishop who says the Resurrection was real, and he has evidence" April 9, 2023
“The U.S., for example, has made huge strides in racial equality and racial justice since 1940, but to listen to some Wokesters you’d think that racism now is as bad as—or even worse than—the days of Jim Crow. Wokesters claim that it’s just gone underground and has a different form. This, to me, is a ludicrous belief, refuted by tons of evidence.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Book review: “Left is Not Woke”" May 18, 2023
“There are no activists so authoritarian and unforgiving as gender activists.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gender activists get a paper retracted for unjustified technical reasons—just to discredit its results" June 15, 2023
“One of the purposes of a university is to find the truth, but that can’t be done if free discussion is banned.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2024 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An unanswered letter to the head of the University of Auckland" July 10, 2024
“How embarrassing is it, given the situation, that the SSE, the ASN, and the SSB got their biology wrong while the Trump administration got it right! But that’s what happens when scientific societies get ideologically captured.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The U.S. government’s new definition of sex" February 20, 2025
“It’s funny, but telling, that those who claim that sex is a spectrum or continuum never specify how many sexes there are, either in humans or other species. I suspect that if they responded—based on their “multivariate, multidimensional” definition of sex—that “there are many, many sexes,” or “I can’t answer that”, they would be laughed out of the house. But we all know that that the “spectrum” people are not dumb or willfully ignorant. They are simply imbued with a certain ideology.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The fundamental fallacy of the “sex spectrum”" February 23, 2025
“I really dislike land acknowledgments because they’re purely performative. They are there to make the issuer look progressive and moral, but they accomplish exactly nothing. And that is what “woke” means.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tuesday: Hili dialogue" May 13, 2025
“The whole brouhaha serves to demonstrate that “cancel culture”—the attempt to ruin someone’s career if they transgress “progressive” ideological stands—is alive and well.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Alex Byrne’s “colleagues” dogpile him for co-writing a critique of American pediatric gender medicine" July 7, 2025
“No, if there is to ever be a two-state solution, the Palestinian side cannot be run by anyone with a history of sponsoring terrorism. And Palestinian leaders like that are hard to find.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: U.S. denies visa to Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas (and other Palestinians) ahead of UN meeting" August 31, 2025
“Well, those opposing extreme gender ideology may be fomenting things, but it’s not because we’re white, religious, or nationalistic. And have these organizations ever considered that there may be many black people or Hispanics who also oppose gender activism? One might even say that blaming all this stuff on white people is a form of racism.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A schism between secular organizations" September 6, 2025
“Keeping budgets secret is what universities do.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Friday: Hili dialogue" September 12, 2025
“I do care when people like Steve Novella, who should know better, argue that biological sex is not a binary but a spectrum. In fact, there are far more people born with more or fewer than 20 fingers and toes than are born as true intersexes, yet we do not say that “digit number in humans is a spectrum.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2026 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Another critique of Agustín Fuentes’s claim of a sex spectrum in humans and other species" February 1, 2026
“Yes, it’s true that gender ideologues will oppose the article and upcoming book, but they have long put ideology over science, a strategy that is a loser, as we know from the failures of creationism and intelligent design.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2026 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Jesse Singal’s op-ed in the NYT: A turning point in “affirmative care”?" February 25, 2026
“The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This book lays out the main lines of evidence for evolution. For those who oppose Darwinism purely as a matter of faith, no amount of evidence will do—theirs is a belief not based on reason.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s clear that this resistance stems largely from religion. You can find religions without creationism, but you never find creationism without religion.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most famous is the appendix.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tiny, nonfunctional wings, a dangerous appendix, eyes that can’t see, and silly ear muscles simply don’t make sense if you think that species were specially created.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn’t exist.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We now have many of the answers that once eluded Darwin, thanks to two developments that he could not have imagined: continental drift and molecular taxonomy.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you can’t think of an observation that could disprove a theory, that theory simply isn’t scientific.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because of the hegemony of fundamentalist religion in the United States, this country has been among the most resistant to the fact of human evolution.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible—though very unlikely—that our whole world is controlled by elves. But supernatural explanations like these are simply never needed; we manage to understand the natural world just fine using reason and materialism.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are the one creature to whom natural selection has bequeathed a brain complex enough to comprehend the laws that govern the universe. And we should be proud that we are the only species that has figured out how we came to be.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A well-understood and testable hypothesis like sexual selection surely trumps an untestable appeal to the inscrutable caprices of a creator.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although this book deals with the conflict between religion and science, I see this as only one battle in a wider war—a war between rationality and superstition. Religion is but a single brand of superstition (others include beliefs in astrology, paranormal phenomena, homeopathy, and spiritual healing), but it is the most widespread and harmful form of superstition. And science is but one form of rationality (philosophy and mathematics are others), but it is a highly developed form, and the only one capable of describing and understanding reality.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It didn’t take long to realize the futility of using evidence to sell evolution to Americans, for faith led them to discount and reject the facts right before their noses.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was flabbergasted. How could it be that someone found evidence convincing but was still not convinced? The answer, of course, was that his religion had immunized him against my evidence.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science and religion, then, are competitors in the business of finding out what is true about our universe. In this goal religion has failed miserably, for its tools for discerning “truth” are useless. These areas are incompatible in precisely the same way, and in the same sense, that rationality is incompatible with irrationality.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Understanding reality, in the sense of being able to use what we know to predict what we don’t, is best achieved using the tools of science, and is never achieved using the methods of faith. That is attested by the acknowledged success of science in telling us about everything from the smallest bits of matter to the origin of the universe itself—compared with the abject failure of religion to tell us anything about gods, including whether they exist.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One can meet all the emotional requisites of a human—except for the assurance that you’ll find a life after death—without the superstitions of religion.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If religion and science get along so well, why are so many scientists nonbelievers?”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ironically, as the credibility of creationists grows smaller, their voices get louder.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After all, what new insights has religion produced in the last century?”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The rational scrutiny of religious faith involves asking believers only two questions: How do you know that? What makes you so sure that the claims of your faith are right and the claims of other faiths are wrong?”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any “knowledge” incapable of being revised with advances in data and human thinking does not deserve the name of knowledge.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religion is heavily laden with the kind of confirmation bias that makes people see their own faiths as true and all others as false. In other words, religion is replete with features to help people fool themselves.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source