“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

How nice – to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

The only proof he needed for existence of god was music.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Science is magic that works.

If somebody says ‘I love you’ to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? ‘I love you, too’.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies- God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

All this happened, more or less.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.

I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks like a bitter bellhop. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life was much easier.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

If you’re going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones. After all, there are better ways to starve to death.

It is better for me to die in behalf of Jesus Christ, than to reign over all the ends of the earth.

When Jesus died on the cross and cried out, ‘It is finished!’ He not only died for our sins, but for our diseases too.

Death: the only true emotion felt in an apathetic world.

There are those who believe justice and dignity are reserved only for some people. Young men have died in police custody, and the growing heel of poverty has worn down harder on children of color…We must fight back.

The disciples obey because that’s what people do when someone rises from the dead and gives instructions.