It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.

My political life has been informed by the view that if there was any truth to religion there wouldn't really be any need for politics.

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.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.

I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.

The brilliant Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility into something ineffable.