The Epicureans denied that the gods had created the world and also denied that they played any role in it.

I don't see how being a faster runner, or a better mathematician makes you 'deserve' access to a better life, or more influence on policy, in the absence of a social decision to play that game in the way it's proposed to be organised for some set of benefits.

For seventeenth-century astronomers, the Epicurean doctrine of multiple worlds separated by void space was seen to fit with the new Copernican system in which every star was a sun, and the universe was a vast place with no centre.

I had the idea that there were secret laws of the universe that could explain the baffling human reality around me, and that philosophers maybe had the key to them.

The (atomic) soul is mortal, and the best life is the one with the least pain and the most pleasure.

If you live in an acquisitive society you are likely to be acquisitive, but it isn't deeply rooted in human nature, except in the sense that it's deeply rooted to be psychologically receptive to your peers and to advertising.

We have to gamble, and sometimes lose as George Ainslie argues; this keeps the appetite for life sharp.