If God were alive today, He'd be an atheist.

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

Because of the movies nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.