I think the cultural task is to separate our impulses and needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.
Nothing proves evolution more than the survival of the religious belief. It shows we are still fearful, partially formed animals with a terror of death and the dark.
An antique saying has it that a man’s life is incomplete unless or until he has tasted love, poverty, and war.
Find a society that’s adopted the teachings of Spinoza, Voltaire, Galileo, Einstein, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and gone down the pits – as a result of doing that – into famine and war and dictatorship and torture and repression. That’s the experiment I would like to run. I don’t think that’s going to end up with a gulag.
Who but a slave thanks his master for what his master has decided to do without bothering to consult him.
Those who worry about the treatment of animals are often accused of sentimentality or of putting the plight of beasts before the immense problems of humanity. But it is quite rare to find a humanitarian who is indifferent to animals and surprisingly common to find that those who belittle animal rights are the same ones who find the pain of humans easy to bear.
The ‘environment’ is not the gift of entrepreneurs, risk takers, or investors. It is the common, inherited property of humanity.
The deficit, then, is not the difference between what America spends and what America earns; it is, to a striking extent, the difference between what the rich owe and what the rich pay.
As ever, the true address of the missionary is to the self-satisfaction of the sponsor and the donor, and not to the needs of the downtrodden.
He Showed Up. Throughout his life and times, whenever and wherever something important was on the line, he presented himself.
It’s important to be able to recognise and seize crux moments when they do appear, but much of the time one is faced with quotidian tasks and routines. There’s an art and a science to these things; the art consists in trying to improvise more inventive means of breaking a silence and the science consists in trying to make the periods of silence bearable.
There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like antipolitics, just as there is no worldliness compare with ostentatious antimaterialism.
As an atheist, you abandon your imaginary friend, you forgo the comforting props of a celestial father figure to bail you out of trouble.
When love goes bad nothing goes worse.
An ideal scandal is the one that reveals to us what our leaders really think of us; the fools they take us to be and the ease with which they get away with things.
Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience, that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming the appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either.
Erections could be like cops: often there when you emphatically didn’t require them and sometimes absent when you did. Or so I have been told by friends who thought they could trust me.
Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in that air which made one think – made me think for many years – that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it.
Quarrels on the left have a tendency to become miniature treason trials, replete with all kinds of denunciation. There’s a general tendency – not by any means confined to radicals but in some way specially associated with them – to believe that once the lowest motive for a dissenting position has been found, it must in some way be the real one.
Thomas Jefferson said, “I tremble for my country when I remember that god is just.
The great cultural project... may very well be to rescue what we have of the art and aesthetic of religion while discarding the supernatural.