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

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.

I think my being such a nomad let me into acting. I was always having to create a new image whenever we moved.

We have a very precise image – an image at times shameless – of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

You get an image after you act in a film, but it is not necessary that you last long because of that image.

When I think about the LGBT movement for example, they have had a really intentional strategy to try to change images and representation of LGBT people in the media and the culture.

Human nature, as we know it, is in a formative state. It is being changed into the image of the thing it loves.

Actually, all paths lead away from the truth…how’s that? All paths. There’s no such thing as a path to the truth. The truth’s already here, where are you going?

I now find myself looking at every sentence, every image, that purports to tell the West about the Arabs and the Muslims with this question in mind: to what extent does it feed into existing stereotypes and established prejudice?

If you have any image of what the Truth is, slay it immediately because that’s not it.