Like heterosexuality, faith in immaterial realities is popularly considered essential to individual morality.

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.

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

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.

Everybody knows what California smog is - that's fog with the vitamins removed.

The word hammockable (describing two trees that are the perfect distance apart between which a hammock can be hung) is not in the dictionary, but it should be. [Of lying in hammocks]

The downsides of globalization are indeed painful, ... But taking the bigger pills against its ills is superior to living inside a sterile bubble.

I've been misquoted a lot, and there's this tendency for people to put on to you how they think you should be or what they think you should feel.

I'm like a good cheese. I'm just getting mouldy enough to be interesting.

If soot stains your tunic, dye it black. This is vengeance.

The only zen thoughts you can find on a mountain summit are those you brought yourself.

The desert was bad, but nothing could compare with the horrors of a tropical rain forest.

The only thing intimidating about Cube is that he's the father of gangsta' rap. You just worry about getting your lines right, or he might shoot you.

Hardness ever of hardness is mother.