“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”

The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.

Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it.

To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing.

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Uncertainty that comes from knowledge (knowing what you don’t know) is different from uncertainty coming from ignorance.

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.

The greatest weapons in the conquest of knowledge are an understanding mind and the inexorable curiosity that drives it on.

The New Atheists are not open or willing to go where the evidence leads, unless that evidence sustains their own naturalistic assumptions. They have covertly reduced all philosophical thought and deduction to– ironically-fait h!

Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn’t care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

Atheism is an exercise in intellectual contempt.

As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.

The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.

I’m not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.

To sustain the belief that there is no God, atheism has to demonstrate infinite knowledge, which is tantamount to saying, “I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge