My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

If god really wanted people to be free of [wicked thoughts], he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

We know how to think. We know how to laugh. We know we're going to die, which gives us a lot to think about, and we have a need for, what I would call, "the transcendent" or "the numinous" or even "the ecstatic" that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn't trust anyone who didn't respond to things of that sort.

Demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes.

Those who want to be offended don't have the right to try and close down the newspaper that offends them.

It is a pity that...the majority of feminists and their allies have stuck to the dead ground of "Me Decade" possessive individualism, an ideology that has more in common than it admits with the prehistoric right, which it claims to oppose but has in fact encouraged.