Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.

Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge. Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.

Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.

The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both.