It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.

A poor degenerate from the ape, Whose hands are four, whose tail's a limb, I contemplate my flaccid shape And know I may not rival him Save with my mind.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation.