“Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.”

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.

What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ or ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?

People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.

What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody’s beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.

The core of science is not a mathematical modeling–it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle.

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

How we pay attention to the present moment…determin es the character of our experience and…the quality of our lives.

The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence.

False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.

Let me assure you that my intent is not to offend or merely be provocative. I’m simply worried.

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

The power of psychedelics is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.

This is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own.

It is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.