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.
I don’t have a body, I am a body.
Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.
Jesus makes large claims for his heavenly father but never mentions that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her when she makes an appearance.
Take the risk of thinking for yourself.
The faithful believe that certain truths have been ‘revealed.’ The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.
I don’t think there’s any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings; I don’t know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.
I don’t have any terrific self-esteem issues but I do sometimes realise I’ve been too lucky and that I’m over-praised. It makes me nervous. I have this sense of being overrated.
I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.
To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, and not something you do.
So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion.
Atheists have always argued that this world is all that we have, and that our duty is to one another to make the very most and best of it.
Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.
An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence.
It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy’s children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy’s graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten.
Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a ‘first generation’ of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.
It’s a matter of principle. If Jews born in Brooklyn have a right to a state in Palestine, then Palestinians born in Jerusalem have a right to a state in Palestine.