In its more authoritarian forms, religion punishes questioning and rewards gullibility. Faith is not a function of stupidity, but a frequent cause of it.

Jargon seems to be the place where the right brain and the left brain meet.

Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.

What might once have been called whining is now exalted as a process of asserting selfhood; self-absorption is regarded as a form of self-expression.

Under the rubric of religious freedom, we respect the right to worship differently much more than the right to worship not at all.

Secularists are often wrongly accused of trying to purge religious ideals from public discourse. We simply want to deny them public sponsorship.

Faith is not a function of stupidity but a frequent cause of it.

As Camille Paglia's success has demonstrated, what is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought.

Whatever lessons we take from this dreadful attack (on the World Trade Center and Pentagon), we should never forget that it was, after all, a faith based initiative.

Tolerance is thin gruel compared to the rapture of absolute truths. It's not surprising that religious people are often better protected by atheists and agnostics than each other.

In this climate - with belief in guardian angels and creationism becoming commonplace - making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion hall.

The important thing is not to survive, but to live.

The wrong approaches to faith and to skepticism are equally detrimental to the path. For the former declares its answers too soon and is later found false

Sometimes, I wondered if I might speed up his words by grabbing his wrists and finishing his gestures for him.

What kind of town do we want in the future, and how are we going to plan on that?

As you get older you feel you need to pay more attention to what is around you and relish it. I'm greedy for beauty.

At the end of the day, if we don't win that game, we're going home, anyway, so what does it matter. I just wanted to be available, and it ended up to the point where I could help out tonight.

There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

The body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange it

You can't make Howard Dean a straw man. He is what he appears to be. And that's the beauty of Howard Dean.

When you have an intense contact of love with nature or another human being, like a spark, then you understand that there is no time and that everything is eternal.