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

Religion makes kind people say unkind things: “I must prove my faith, so mutilate the genitals of my children.” They wouldn’t do that if God didn’t tell them to do so.

Today I want to puke when I hear the word ‘radical’ applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.

Some people say that without God, people would give themselves permission to do anything. [Yet] only with God, only with the view that God’s on your side, can people give themselves permission to do things that otherwise would be called satanic.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language – always the language – was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.

The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.

My own opinion is enough for me. And I claim the right to defend it against any consensus, any majority anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.

The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.

Arguments that explain everything explain nothing.

In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

Don’t set your wit against a child.

You shouldn’t feel unsafe walking to school. It’s where you should feel safe. Our parents should feel their children are going to be taken care of, looked after.

I’m convinced that before the year 2000 is over, the first child will have been born on the moon.

When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.

More childish valorous than manly wise.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

Books, the children of the brain.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.