“Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.”

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.

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.

The evolutionists seem to know everything about the missing link except the fact that it is missing.

I came from a big family. As a matter of fact, I never got to sleep alone until I was married.

MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

While my life shifts from refugee camps to red carpets, I choose them both because these worlds can, in fact, coexist. And for me, they must.

To describe something as being black and white means it is clearly defined. Yet when your ethnicity is black and white, the dichotomy is not that clear. In fact, it creates a grey area.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact.

There is no doubt that we cannot do without variable quantities in the sense of the potential infinite. But from this very fact the necessity of the actual infinite can be demonstrated.

The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.