“The problem with religion, because it’s been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.”

It’s simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.

When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don’t believe as you do.

If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life – you won’t enjoy any of it.

If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.

You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.

George Bush says he speaks to god every day, & Christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.

It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.

The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It’s really no more inflammatory than that.

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.

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

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

Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the false to achieve primacy over the facts.

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

You cannot use someone else’s fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.

I do the very best I can to look upon life with optimism and hope and looking forward to a better day.

And when someone apologizes to you enough times for things they’ll never stop doing, I think it’s fearless to stop believing them. It’s fearless to say “you’re not sorry” and walk away.

I believe we have a responsibility to do even more. It’s so important that we’re changing.

I know you won’t believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others.

What you do is proof of what you believe.

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.