I'm not afraid of being dead, that's to say there's nothing to be afraid of. I won't know I'm dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I'm alive in any way at all, that'll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.

It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.

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

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It's as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness.