Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
In my life, the only certainty is to be uncertain. I'm an unbeliever who believes in skepticism. I'm only sure about being unsure.
The fact is: It's true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.
I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.
It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.
The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power.
I appear as a skeptic, who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery and all innovation.
(Howard) Dean is a raving nut bag...a raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag...I and a few other people saw that he should be destroyed.
What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.
Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well.
It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.
it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists
A celebrity is well known for being well known. I'm relatively well known - but for what I've written and said, or so I fondly imagine.
My political life has been informed by the view that if there was any truth to religion there wouldn't really be any need for politics.
If you've led a rather bohemian and rackety life, as I have, it's precisely the cancer that you'd expect to get. That's a bit of a yawn.
If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.
No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine
As well as being a vulgar producer of her own spectacle, and an embarrassment to her family, Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist.
I think the cultural task is to separate our impulses and needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.
To reflect upon the event horizon is a great deal more awe-inspiring than a burning bush or a wooden statue that weeps or pees or bleeds.
In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.
What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.
Atheists have always argued that this world is all that we have, and that our duty is to one another to make the very most and best of it.
Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever.
Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things... one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.
When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.
An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence
The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.
Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.
I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.
The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.
It [Obama's Nobel peace prize] would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.
I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.
Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.
I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.
Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective.
Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.
The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
I have a strong constitution which has served me quite well, though if I hadn't had such a strong one I might have led a more healthy life perhaps.
The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.
It must be obvious to anyone who can think at all that the charges against the Hussein regime are, as concerns arsenals of genocidal weaponry, true.
I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.
A rule of thumb with humor; if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough. If everybody laughs, you have failed.
I personally want to "do" death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.
No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.
Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century.
The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.
In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.
I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.
I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.