“The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.”

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

There’s been some research in cognitive science, I’m told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it’s white noise.

I became a journalist because I didn’t want to have to rely on the press for information… I only read it to make sure of whatever everyone else thinks is going on, because it’s useful to know what people think is the news.

One of the most repellent spectacles at election times is the pretense of piety on the part of people running for office.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself.

Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.

No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.

Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.

To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

I’m not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.

We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.

I’m not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they’ll have, immediately the floor will rise.

Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

You must understand: they fear you. There is nothing scarier in their minds than a girl who knows the power of her flames.

If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you’re out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.

Being an artist is more of a mindset, a way of seeing things; it is no longer so much about producing something.

Food makes my mind sluggish.

The body achieves what the mind believes.

Excuse me if I have some place in my mind where I go time to time.