To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world - to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish - is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.

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.

It is time we admitted that we are not at war with “terrorism.” We are at war with Islam.

As a man believes, so he will act.

We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.

All I'm arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there's no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty-and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I'm telling you I arrived at it irrationally.

It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.