“Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.”

Most of us are wiser than we may appear to be. On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice.

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

If we look at the fact, we shall find that the great inventions of the age are not, with us at least, always produced in universities.

The facts of life are that a child who has seen war cannot be compared with a child who doesn’t know what war is except from television.

Self-judgment continues to arise – it’s a strong habit – but the fact that I made a conscious commitment to recognize it has helped me stop feeding the story of being unworthy.

There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact.

If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart.

It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures.

Love’s like a junkie, addiction’s a fact. Passion’s a monkey, you can’t keep off your back.

In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption