I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise.

He's a man [George W. Bush] who is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is a man who is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.

What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.