“She’s got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”

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.

Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of ‘the flock.

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other’s churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do.

Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things… one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.

But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.

But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.

There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it.

A woman loses a charm with every pin she takes out.

I am ugly but what I do have is charm.

I think romance is anything honest. As long as it’s honest, it’s so disarming.

Our native land charms us with inexpressible sweetness, and never, never allows us to forget that we belong to it.

I can have oodles of charm when I want to.