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

Take the risk of thinking for yourself.

Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.

No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.

Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.

To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

I’m not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.

We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.

I’m not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they’ll have, immediately the floor will rise.

The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

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.

I always wanted my music to influence the life you were living emotionally – with your family, your lover, your wife, and, at a certain point, with your children.

We gotta get out while we’re young, ’cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

Grandparenthood is one of life’s rewards for surviving your own children.

The one thing I wished for my children is that they’d be readers.

Having toddlers always means that there’s a fair amount of chaos at home, but that’s part of the fun. And from a work perspective, we have projects under construction all over the world, including many right here in the US.

Getting a burp out of your little thing when she needs it is probably the greatest satisfaction I’ve come across at this point in my life.

Having children has made me incredibly efficient. It’s hard to leave them in the mornings, but I’m extremely productive during the day, knowing I want to be fully focused on them when I get home.

The new religion will teach the dignity of human nature and its infinite possibilities for development. It will teach the solidarity of the race: that all must rise and fall as one. Its creed will be justice, liberty, equality for all the children of earth.