“One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on.”

Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.

She’s got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.

The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.

Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.

Ever since I discovered that my god given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return.

Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.

The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.

The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.

If the Qur’an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.

The noble title of “dissident” must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

It’s called faith because it’s not knowledge.

I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.

Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It’s over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don’t.

A person’s genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.

A person’s genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.

A person’s genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.

This above all makes history useful and desirable; it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.

This above all makes history useful and desirable; it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.

This above all makes history useful and desirable; it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.