“Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.”

Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime.

The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book.

American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.

Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life.

I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.

Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.

It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.

Being an atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily, and fully.

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.

The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened.

A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!

Epicurus’s old questions are still unanswered: Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? then whence evil?

When the devil is called god of this world, it is not because he made it, but because we serve him with our worldiness.

God himself would not permit evil in this world if good did not come of it for the benefit and harmony of the universe.

Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.

You can make money doing evil.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.