Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well.
In one way, I suppose, I have been ‘in denial’ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.
Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.
Well, I’ll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.
For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time.
The man who prays is the one who thinks that God has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct God how to put them right.
The stupider the regime the more intelligent the people get and the more humorous.
Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things.
In my life, the only certainty is to be uncertain. I’m an unbeliever who believes in skepticism. I’m only sure about being unsure.
Religion attacks us in our deepest integrity by saying we wouldn’t be able to make a moral decision without it.
Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.
Those who had alleged that a million civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam!
Where would you like to live? In a state of conflict or a conflicted state?
Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect.
It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who you don’t know but who are unbelievers and say, ‘Now are you gonna change your mind?’ That is considered almost a polite question.
Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.
I am a person of faith: I am a person who will believe practically anything on no evidence at all.
Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.
If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.