Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well.

The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

He's a man [George W. Bush] who is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is a man who is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I'm still quite robust.