“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.”

If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.

The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God’s representative on earth.

If you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don’t think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad.

I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world.

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

Jesus makes large claims for his heavenly father but never mentions that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her when she makes an appearance.

The gods that we’ve made are exactly the gods you’d expect to be made by a species that’s about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.

Religion makes kind people say unkind things: “I must prove my faith, so mutilate the genitals of my children.” They wouldn’t do that if God didn’t tell them to do so.

Today I want to puke when I hear the word ‘radical’ applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.

Some people say that without God, people would give themselves permission to do anything. [Yet] only with God, only with the view that God’s on your side, can people give themselves permission to do things that otherwise would be called satanic.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language – always the language – was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.

The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.

There’s always a ying-yang in life. With everybody. There’s evil in all of us. It’s just about how you balance out the evil and the good and having faith in yourself and how you carry yourself.

Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough. Sometimes people have got to have their faith rewarded.

I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder.

By the blessings of heaven I mean to live and die, please God, in the faith of my mother.

Our faith teaches that there is no safer reliance than upon the God of our fathers who has so singularly favored the American people in every national trial and who will not forsake us so long as we obey His commandments and walk humbly in His footsteps

Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

Advent allows us to recover during this four-week journey. It begins four Sundays before Christmas all the way up to Christmas. It lets us breath in those moments of faithfulness and helps us recognize that God is working.

God will always do great things with people who are willing to be faithful in the small things.