“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”

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. Thats the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately aft...”

“I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian Id been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregation...”

“He looked like an excited sixteen-year-old with his tousled hair and shining eyes. Barbara could not deny she liked him, even though every word he said was repellent to her. With an eloquence that ...”

“I picture it like Judgement Day,' he says finally, his eyes on the water. 'We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together...”

“There are few times that I feel more at peace, more in tune, more Zen, if you will, than when I force myself to unplug.”

“[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. ...”