“Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.”

Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.

To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

I’m not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.

We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.

I’m not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they’ll have, immediately the floor will rise.

The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, ‘Well, good on you. See you there.’

I’m a member of no party. I have no ideology. I’m a rationalist. I do what I can in the international struggle between science and reason and the barbarism, superstition and stupidity that’s all around us.

Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.

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.

…International education cannot be the work of one country. It is the responsibility and promise of all nations. It calls for free exchange and full collaboration…The knowledge of our citizens is one treasure which grows only when it is shared.

Nobody respects a country with a poor army, but everybody respects a country with a good army. I raise my toast to the Finnish army.

No industry or country can reach its full potential until women reach their full potential. This is especially true of science and technology, where women with a surplus of talent still face a deficit of opportunity.

We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.

Observe that anyone who dies for his country is a fortunate man, but death takes what it wants, indiscriminately, in peace-time as well as in war. It is better to die with freedom than without it.

I’ve seen my name on marquees and bowed to standing ovations. I’ve also been called a fraud, a mental case, a heretic. People all over the country wait in line to hug me or curse me.

Citizenship consists in the service of the country.

No country or people who are slaves to dogma and dogmatic mentality can progress.