How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.

The trouble with being a secular humanist is that we don't have a congregation. We don't meet so it's a very flimsy tribe, but there's a wonderful quotation from Nietzsche. Nietzsche said, Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism. Something perfectly is going on. I do not doubt it, but the explanations I hear do not satisfy me.

The little girls were wearing black party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were.

How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened one are right to be.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.