Our desires cannot be, and were never meant to be, satisfied by earthly pleasures alone.

The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence.

Beneath all the rhetoric about relevance lies a profoundly disturbing possibility - that people may base their lives upon an illusion, upon a blatant lie. The attractiveness of a belief is all too often inversely proportional to its truth... To allow "relevance" to be given greater weight than truth is a mark of intellectual shallowness and moral irresponsibility.

The reading of literature opens our eyes, offering us new perspectives on things that we can evaluate and adopt.

The hallmark of intelligence is not whether one believes in God or not, but the quality of the processes that underlie one’s beliefs.

A failure to understand something does not mean it is irrational. It may simply mean that it lies on the far side of our limited abilities to take things in and make complete sense of them.

Surely the better way is to pursue a generous orthodoxy, seeing disagreements in the context of the greater agreements which bind us together.