our great common challenge ... is to free people from religion, get it out of our laws, our schools, our health systems, our government and, I would add, also our sporting events. I would really like to see some separation of church and stadium, if we could work on that.

The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.

Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.

Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production - only to produce a race of bed-wetters!

Once you do lose a job, there are not a lot of social supports for you. You lose health insurance because we have this absurd system in America where health insurance is usually tied to employment. Your income dips. And that's when you get into selling the house.

Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.