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

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.

Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.

She’s got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.

The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.

Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.

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.

Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.

The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.

The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.

If the Qur’an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.

The noble title of “dissident” must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

Let me gaze deeper into your eyes and thank the cosmos in disguise.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

The cosmos deals in the currency of emotion. When we feel good, goodness flows.

In my stillness I am the eternal possibility. In my movement I am the cosmos.

That silent gap between your thoughts is your window to the cosmic mind.

Other times, you’re doing some piece of work and suddenly you get feedback that tells you that you have touched something that is very alive in the cosmos.

The cosmos doesn’t measure sweat and hours for reward. The cosmos deals in the currencies of joy and satisfaction.