Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.

You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.

As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.

There is no reason whatsoever to think that Buddhism can compete successfully with the relentless evangelizing of Christianity and Islam. Nor should it try to.

Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.

Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.