“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.’”

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.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

It’s called faith because it’s not knowledge.

I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

I’m the only talk show host, I think, if there’s such a category in, what’s called, the book of records, to have a guest die while we were taping the show, yeah.

What will be the death of me are buillabaisses, food spiced with pimiento, shellfish, and a load of exquisite rubbish which I eat in disproportionate quantities.

If you believe Jesus ever had a good word for war or torture or tax cuts for the rich, or raping the earth, or refusing water to dying migrants, then you might as well believe bunnies lay painted eggs.

I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.

Death is Peaceful, Life is Harder.

A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.

He was giving up on keeping me alive, letting nature–or rather mob justice–take its course. When he returned, and I was dead, he wouldn’t hold anyone responsible. He would not mourn. All this I could hear in those three words.

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.