The noble title of dissident must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
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...
Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marke...
It has been said that alcohol is a good servant and a bad master. Nice try. The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring.
I am sometimes asked about the concept or definition of a 'public intellectual,' and though I find the whole idea faintly silly, I believe it should ideally mean that the person so identified is self-...
For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.
A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.
Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (a...
If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
To terrify children with the image of hell... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?
I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.
The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.
I think the materialist conception of history is valid.
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a goo...
Well, we can't say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it.
There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. T...
My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.
The road to Damascus was not and is not a one-way street.
The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strang...