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

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.

It's amazing how relaxing it is not to claim you know more than you do. I'm surprised that those who claim to speak in the name of god don't take more advantage of this relief.

Bertrand Russell used to employ the method of "evidence against interest"; in other words of deciding that a critique of capital punishment, say, carried more weight if it came from a prison governor. (My friend John O'Sullivan puts it like this: If the pope says he believes in God, he's only doing his job; if he says he doesn't believe in God, he may be on to something.)

Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.

It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.

The whole reason for the success of Dr. King's civil-rights movement was that it was not a movement for itself. The civil-rights movement understood very clearly, and stated very beautifully, that it was a question of humanism, not a sectarian movement at all.