“In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.”

How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.

The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you.

Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.

Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.

As a man believes, so he will act.

We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.

I’m the Ted Bundy of string theory.

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.

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.

Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.

The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.

Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.

You don’t get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don’t know.

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.

Jesus Christ—who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens—can now be eaten in the form of a cracker

A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

All you have to do is believe, then you will see everything.

If you truly believe it, that’s step one. Step two, is, you know, the hard work that goes along with it.

When I was doing theater, I was very successful at believing that I was great, God’s gift to the theater.

I’ve always been like that; I give 100 percent. I can’t do it any other way.

If you live a life of make-believe, your life isn’t worth anything until you do something that does challenge your reality.

I believe, is that I really act on promises that I make and leave results.

Success comes when we wake up every day in that never-ending pursuit of why we do what we do.

I don’t believe in hope. Hope is a beggar. Hope walks through the fire, faith leaps over it.