When I was 14 a chaplain at school gave me a reading list. I read everything and I went back to him with a question: how can you really believe in this stuff?

Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.

If there is anything worth fearing in the world, it is living in such a way that gives one cause for regret in the end.

...mastery of the emotions is fundamental to a virtuous life.

Look at the blogosphere - the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration.

Nothing is truly unnatural, because everything that exists, including human intelligence, is a product of nature. If human intelligence can devise ways for the genes from two men to result in a child, their doing so is an entirely natural event.

To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.