Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me.
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise.
Will an Iraq war make our Al Qaeda problem worse? Not likely.
The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.
I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.
I've proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.
When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.
I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.
Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime.
As I've said before, you can be an atheist and anything you like.
The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.
I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light.
What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.
There either is a god or there is not; there is a 'design' or not.
I don't even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.
I worked out early on to give up things I couldn't do well at all.
I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.
That most risky and volatile of all things a self-pitying majority.
Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.
Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.
I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.
I have often thought that when I do die it will be of sheer boredom.
Human society is inconceivable unless words are to some extent bonds.
Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.
If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.
You don't say 'they all do it' unless you know you've been doing it too.
Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.
Demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes.
For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism.
Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.
If the Qur'an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.
I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.
Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.
Where would you like to live? In a state of conflict or a conflicted state?
The moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage.
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.
What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.
Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.
To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.
If you can charm everyone it means you don't care about anyone in particular.
Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled.
I don't want them (religious followers) trying to inflict their belief on me.
It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.
I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.