It’s normally agreed that the question How are you? doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, A bit early to say. (I...
It is odd, when you think about it, that we accuse racists of discrimination. This is the very thing of which they are by definition incapable: They think all members of certain groups are the same.
It is among men of genius and science that Atheism alone is found, but among these alone is cherished an hostility to those errors, with which the illiterate and vulgar are infected. How small is the...
In the late 1940s, a dystopian novel based on the notorious horrors of ‘National Socialism’ would probably have been very well-received. But it would have done nothing to shake the complacency of West...
In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it i...
I began the project of judging Mother Teresa’s reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation.
Fuck off, some of them seem to be yelling at coalition forces. A lot hinges on the appropriate military response. Fuck you might be risky. OK, off we fuck, then might buy some valuable time.
Created sick, and then commanded to be well. This is one of the first, easiest, and most obvious of the satirical maxims that eventually lay waste to the illusion of faith.
And it seems possible, moving to the psychological arena, that people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.
All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world and to the longed-for moment when all will be revealed and when the sheep will be divided from the goats, or whatever other buc...
A point, like a joke, is a terrible thing to miss.
A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull and obvious remark would be al...
Adlai Stevenson once said to Richard Nixon: If you stop telling lies about me I’ll stop telling the truth about you.
I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap.
As with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer towar...
[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did n...
With alcoholic ritual, the whole point is generosity. If you open a bottle of wine, for heaven's sake have the grace to throw away the damn cork.
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
The one unforgivable sin is to be boring
The duties, which a man performs as a friend or parent, do not seem merely owing to his benefactor or children; nor can he be wanting to these duties, without breaking through all the ties of nature a...