Shakespeare has done far more for the world than the Bible.

Secularism is a religion, a religion that is understood. It has no mysteries, no mumblings, no priests, no ceremonies, no falsehoods, no miracles, and no persecutions.

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.

Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.

Do you not know that every religion in the world has declared every other religion a fraud? Yes, we all know it. That is the time all religions tell the truth - each of the other.

Superstition is, always has been, and forever will be, the foe of progress, the enemy of education and the assassin of freedom.

The myth of hell represents all the meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty, all the hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable.

Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.

Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.

The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.

Marriage . . . is not a love affair

After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree.

If she was going to die she wanted to go out with chocolate in one hand and a shopping bag in the other.

A library after closing is a lonely place. It is heart-poundingly silent, and the rows of shelves create an almost unfathomable number of dark and creepy corners.

It's always dangerous to overinterpret what Donald Trump says at any one moment.

As a group, anthropologists are not too fond of people who work in the business world.

It's hard being on a new network, a smaller network.

In accepting death as inevitable, we don't label it as a good thing or a bad thing. As one of my teachers once said to me, “Death happens. It is just death, and how we meet it is up to us.

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

When I began experimenting, people weren't ready for it. Once it's in its second and third generational stages, people can accept it.