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.
The drops (polio vaccine) were designed,said these believers. Their intention and effect was genocidal. Nobody was to swallow them, or administer them to infants. Within months, polio was back...
The brief answer is that I have become inured without becoming indifferent.
One of the juiciest pleasures of life is to be able to salute and embrace, as elected leaders and honored representatives, people whom you first met when they were on the run or in exile or (like Adam...
In whatever kind of a race life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of...
And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.
I had never before been a special fan of that great comedian Phyllis Diller, but she utterly won my heart this week by sending me an envelope that, when opened, contained a torn-off square of brown-ba...
My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get...
Because their lack of conscience prevents them from blushing—
The road to Damascus was not and is not a one-way street.
The greatest, equally with the smallest motions of the Universe, are subjected to the rigid necessity of inevitable laws. These laws are the unknown causes of the known effects perceivable in the Univ...
Saul Bellow: Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything.
Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that o...
PATRIOTIC AND TRIBAL feelings belong to the squalling childhood of the human race, and become no more charming in their senescence.
It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory
I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do
Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner.
Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the c...
I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.