The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods

People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.

After all, if you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you also have to believe that no one was ever improved by a book (or a play or a movie). You have to believe, in other words, that all art is morally trivial and that, consequently, all education is morally irrelevant. No one, not even a university professor, really believes that.

Even if we can't be happy, we must always be cheerful.

The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them.

It was a new kind of class war - the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector.

If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without ... let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine - for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish.