“There is no such thing as closure, and it wouldn’t be worth having if it were available, because all it would mean is that something that was quite an important part of you had gone numb.”

The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

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

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?’

Why limit yourself to small things? When the whole is available.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

I have learned that love is the most powerful force available to us. When we have real love we have the strength to perform miracles.

A vaccine, when available, must be free and available to all people regardless of income.

We have no proof, But if we extrapolate, based on the best information we have available to us, we have to come to the conclusion that, other life probably exists out there and perhaps in many places.

There are more reviews available than the views.

Happiness is available. Please help yourself to it.

Opportunities will be available to you that you cannot imagine.