The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

Exercise is a pastime only for those who are already slender and physically fit. It just isn't so much fun when you have a marked tendency to wheeze and throw up, and a cannonball of a belly sloshing around inside the baggy garments.

I think that there is no supernatural dimension. The natural world is quite wonderful enough. The more we know about it, the much more wonderful it is than any supernatural proposition.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.

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

The discovery there is no god is a great relief, because if there were, it would be like living in a celestial North Korea if there was one. You would never be able to escape.