Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.

Evil…doesn’t mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to “the Christian majority’s” private liking.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferociousdefence? One might have supposed him amply capable of lookingafter himself.

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration tomoral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually writtenin it?

However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.

More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.

People will say anything, especially if they think it's what you want to hear. What we do is what matters. The proof of words is in actions.

Morality is only for the middle class, sweet. The lower class can't afford it, and the upper classes have entirely too much leisure time to fill

I have all sorts of problems and feel discouraged.

I believe America will always win the war. It's a superpower that no one can challenge. The real challenge is for the United States to win the peace.

To be an artist is to believe in life.

MTV has always been about redefining itself.

The impromptu reply is precisely the touchstone of the man of wit.

You know I had rather be laughed at than not to be noticed at all.

The best years are when you know what you're doing.

It's crazy how we always hate the things closest to us.