The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.
It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.
Ever since I discovered that my god given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return.
Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever.
I am, I hope, never offensive by accident.
Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.
I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.
Three words for those who want to put the Christ back in Christmas: Jingle Bell Rock.
The noble title of “dissident” must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled...
A rule of thumb with humor; if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough. If everybody laughs, you have failed.
In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others.
Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.
There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.
I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It’s as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.
Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.
The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.