The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God's representative on earth.

If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.

Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.

The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.

Lately I find myself staring at people’s faces... I find myself frantically searching through the crowds for one face. I don’t find that face

Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.

Sun's up, uh huh, looks okay - the world survives into another day, and I'm thinking about eternity. Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me.

You said that the mind is like the wind but perhaps it is we who are like the wind Knowing nothing, simply blowing through. Never aging, never dying.

I already committed Darren [Criss] to giving a song.

It is always worth while asking a question, though it is not always worth while answering one.

Some have courage in pleasures, and some in pains: some in desires, and some in fears, and some are cowards under the same conditions.

In stirring up tumult and strife, the worst men can do the most, but peace and quiet cannot be established without virtue.

Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.