“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.”

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.’

Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.

Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.

So there’s nothing more vulgar than the sound of someone saying, God Bless America, someone who doesn’t really believe it, but he thinks it will make him look good to other people. I think it’s the most nauseating spectacle.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.

Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.

The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

I’m an atheist. I’m not neutral about religion, I’m hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

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

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

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.

The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me.

To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off.

The teachers at my school were quite often card-carrying members of the Labour Party and it just was not part of the culture to approve of what the government was doing.

Any country that makes U.S. service members get on their knees will feel the full force and fury of the United States of America.

What you hear, you forget; what you see, you remember; what you do, you understand.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof.

I am a vicar’s daughter and still a practising member of the Church of England.

I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.

My brother is the youngest member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. And I wouldn’t let him cut my nails.