Human society is inconceivable unless words are to some extent bonds.

It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body.

Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective.

Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think-though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one-that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.

How do I know that I know this, except that I've always been taught this and never heard anything else? [...] How sure am I of my own views? Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you're bound to be okay, because you're in the safely moral majority.

I don't say things like "the grace of God." All that's white noise to me, not because I'm an intellectual. For many people, it's gibberish. Likewise, the idea that the Koran was dictated by an archaic illiterate is a fantasy.

You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?