So there's nothing more vulgar than the sound of someone saying, God Bless America, someone who doesn't really believe it, but he thinks it will make him look good to other people. I think it's the most nauseating spectacle.

I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.

I personally want to "do" death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

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

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

Jesus is Santa Claus for Adults.