“I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.”

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

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.

Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.

The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

I’m an atheist. I’m not neutral about religion, I’m hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‘Why not?’

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation – is that good for the world?

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.

The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me.

To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off.

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

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.

How could science be an enemy of religion when God commanded man to be a scientist the day He told him to rule the earth and subject it?

I used to ask God to help me. Then I asked if I might help Him to do His work through me.

Beloved, all that is harsh and difficult I want for myself, and all that is gentle and sweet for thee.

Every act of kindness and compassion done by any man for his fellow Christian is done by Christ working within him.

Let us work as if success depended upon ourselves alone, but with heartfelt conviction that we are doing nothing, and God everything.

Take care of your health, that it may serve you to serve God.

I never yet have known the Spirit of God to work where the Lord’s people were divided.

Be sure that your motive in praying is to glorify God.