Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

Wife: a former sweetheart.

The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.

Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.

Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness