Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen

I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well. And getting a sense that the world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that the Empire was over.

The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.

Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.

The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both.