“Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things… one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.”

Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, ‘Well, good on you. See you there.’

I’m a member of no party. I have no ideology. I’m a rationalist. I do what I can in the international struggle between science and reason and the barbarism, superstition and stupidity that’s all around us.

Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.

Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.

So there’s nothing more vulgar than the sound of someone saying, God Bless America, someone who doesn’t really believe it, but he thinks it will make him look good to other people. I think it’s the most nauseating spectacle.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.

Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.

The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

I’m an atheist. I’m not neutral about religion, I’m hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‘Why not?’

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation – is that good for the world?

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.

The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me.

The measure of a country’s greatness is its ability to retain compassion in time of crisis.

If you have the ability to turn bad situations into good ones, then you are lucky.

If you have the ability to turn bad situations into good ones, then you are lucky.

I am not someone like A. B. de Villiers, Gayle, or Dhoni. I don’t have that much power. I have to use my brain to manipulate the field and stick to my strength, which is to hit through the lines.

A lot of times, I can turn and pass without even looking.

I’m not good at anything! I can do, like, two voices.

It is the duty of every man, as far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error.

The tide has pulled the storm from my soul again. But in all that is right or wrong and pure, there is you, and your stunning ability to blur the lines and just be.