When the [US] president writes to Kim Jong Il, the son, the Dear Leader, he doesn't call him Dear Mr President, he calls him Dear Mr Secretary. Have you ever noticed that? Why is that? Because he's not the president of North Korea, he's the head of the Communist Party, the North Korean Workers' Party and he's the head of the Army. He's not head of the state. The head of the state is his father, who's been dead for 15 years.

I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so.

Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.