There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply.

There is no safety this side of the grave

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own . . . and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one that they can't or won't entertain.