“You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.”

The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research.

The habit of spending nearly every waking moment lost in thought leaves us at the mercy of whatever our thoughts happen to be. Meditation is a way of breaking this spell.

Faith enables many of us to endure life’s difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.

As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.

We are all prisoners of our thoughts.

The perpetrators of the Inquisition – the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions – were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God – popes, bishops, friars, and priests.

We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.

Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.

Theology is ignorance with wings.

It’s simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.

When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don’t believe as you do.

If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life – you won’t enjoy any of it.

If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.