Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.
You don’t say ‘they all do it’ unless you know you’ve been doing it too.
The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.
Of course, I do everything for money.
I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.
The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power.
Chemotherapy isn’t good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, ‘Well that is a good thing because it’s supposed to be poison. If it’s making the tumor feel this queasy, then I’m OK with it.’
With modern American dentistry it is simply amazing to see what transformation can be wrought in a single day.
A gentleman is never rude except on purpose – I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.
Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.
My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven’t elected a new one. There’s no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don’t miss it.
No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.
The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It’s a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.
Doubt, skepticism, innovation, and inquiry are the only means by which wonder, beauty, awe, and symmetry will be discovered.
I appear as a skeptic, who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery and all innovation.
If you can charm everyone it means you don’t care about anyone in particular.
Human society is inconceivable unless words are to some extent bonds.
Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.
Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing.