I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right.

I am a person of faith: I am a person who will believe practically anything on no evidence at all.

I have often thought that when I do die it will be of sheer boredom.

The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.

Islam is at once the most and the least interesting of the world's monotheisms. It builds upon its primitive Jewish and Christian predecessors, selecting a chunk here and a shard there, and thus if these fall, it partly falls also.

You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.

Unlike other countries, it was founded on written proclamations. America is an ideal as well as a republic. Its documents are open to revisions. They're works in progress. There's an invitation to participate.