It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.

How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to become mere human beings, shorn of any more compelling national, ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of reason to fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.

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

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.

You cannot take death for apostasy seriously and be working for peace.