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

What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

There’s been some research in cognitive science, I’m told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it’s white noise.

I became a journalist because I didn’t want to have to rely on the press for information… I only read it to make sure of whatever everyone else thinks is going on, because it’s useful to know what people think is the news.

One of the most repellent spectacles at election times is the pretense of piety on the part of people running for office.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself.

Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.

No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.

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.

And in the end, we were all just humans, Drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.

At the end of the day, God’s love for me, for you, and for the world is settled at the cross.

I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything.

In the end, forgiveness simply means never putting another person out of our heart.

I stepped into love with grace. I stepped out of love with grace. The beginning was beautiful. The ending was beautiful.

I’m doing a film now with a lot of guys as well, so at the end of that I will be growing a beard.

There is very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria was a drought that lasted for about five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land.

I hunger for the bread of God, the flesh of Jesus Christ; I long to drink of his blood, the gift of unending love.