“What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.”

“Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being "not even wrong." Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.”

“What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.”

“About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is ...”

“It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy's children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy's graveyards and ...”

“It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory”

“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.”

“If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.”

“I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.”

“Notwithstanding the fact that infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice, we are constantly charged by the chu...”

“I have little use for religion as it is practiced, or for astrology, or for belief in witchcraft or omens of good or ill-luck. I think they all stem from some insufficiency in mens minds, perhaps f...”

“It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.”

“So if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in - at a face, a bird, the colour of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives deligh...”