The violence in the Bible is appalling.

It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who you don’t know but who are unbelievers and say, ‘Now are you gonna change your mind?’ That is considered almost a polite question.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things.

If anything qualifies as an irony of history it would be this: that Marx and Engels throughout the nineteenth century wrote about America the United States as the great country of the future, of freedom and equality and a good life for the working man, and a country of revolution and emancipation, and of Russia as the great country of despotism, backwardness, savagery and superstition.

MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.