“How we pay attention to the present moment…determin es the character of our experience and…the quality of our lives.”

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.

You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.

George Bush says he speaks to god every day, & Christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.

The problem with religion, because it’s been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.

It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.

The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It’s really no more inflammatory than that.

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.

The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.

Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the false to achieve primacy over the facts.

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.

What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ or ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?

People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.

What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody’s beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.

The core of science is not a mathematical modeling–it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.