Not thinking critically, I assumed that the successful prayers were proof that God answers prayer while the failures were proof that there was something wrong with me.

If the Prodigal Son's a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech.

The very concept of sin comes from the Bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?

I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief.

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.

All you have to do is walk into any children's hospital and you know there is no God. Prayer doesn't make any difference. Those people pray for their beloved children to live and they die.

People are always asking, "What's the purpose of life?" That's easy. Relieve suffering. Create beauty. Make gardens.

If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?

I'm proud to be an atheist - it helps me stand for so much more and fall for so much less.

Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy.

How happy can you be when you think every action and thought is being monitored by a judgmental ghost ?

If a woman were elected president, would our nation expect her husband to be the official White House host?

Prosperity only comes as a result of production

Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment.

Our experience is composed rather of illusions lost than of wisdom acquired.

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.

Love can be sordid only if you work at it.

Many a man who pays rent all his life owns his own home; and many a family has successfully saved for a home only to find itself at last with nothing but a house.

A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland.

It's so hard for people to even believe that there was a lesson to be learned at all, because they just think I'm wrong.

You really had to learn to protect yourself from all Gooks in Vietnam, or else you would end up dead.