“My own opinion is enough for me. And I claim the right to defend it against any consensus, any majority anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.”

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 sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.

Even if I accepted that Jesus – like almost every other prophet on record – was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.

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

I say that homosexuality is not just a form of sex, it’s a form of love, and it deserves our respect for that reason.

Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.

The finest fury is the most controlled.

Whatever my fate, I’ll go to it laughing.

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

I’d like to cut an attitude into clothes.

The true Mason does not hold or teach the attitude that, I am a Master Mason now and thus I no longer need to be concerned with using the working tools because they were given in the earlier degrees.

The knife’s edge that separates failure from success in life. That edge is your attitude, which has the power to help shape your reality.

As an actor, my attitude towards using of film versus digital is, if you have film, filmmakers have to cut eventually so you don’t have to learn all that dialogue. With digital, they can just go on forever and it’s a nightmare. So, I like film – nice short takes.

I have this theory that, depending on your attitude, your life doesn’t have to become this ridiculous charade that it seems so many people end up living.

People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.