Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard-or try to turn back-the measureable advances that we have made.

If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.

Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil

To what faults do you feel most indulgent? To the ones that arise from urgent material needs.

The stupider the regime the more intelligent the people get and the more humorous.

Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or of the dark, and for as long as we ­persist in self-­centeredness. That could be a lengthy stretch of time.