You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.

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.

We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.

Science has long been in the value business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best efforts to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument.

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

This is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own.

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