“When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.”

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.

An armed society is a polite society.

One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.

Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there.

It’s an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip.

One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere.

Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again.

Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.

I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured.

The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

They didn’t want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.

But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.

My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too .

Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one’s business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse.

The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.

About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter.

In no instance have… the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.