In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.

Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well.

The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.

I've proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.

Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.

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

This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. . . . In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.