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

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.

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.

I love books and going to bookstores. My favorite sound is the sound of the needle hitting the record.

No one has been a greater botanist or zoologist. No one has written more books, more correctly, more methodically, from personal experience. No one has more completely changed a whole science and started a new epoch.

Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It’s the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.

I don’t think anyone should be banned. If you don’t like a book, set it aside.

Every object strives for its proper place. A book seeks to be near its truest admirer. Just as this helpless moth seeks to be near the candle that infatuates him.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.