You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books.

You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps.

Everyone who has eyes to see can see that if the God of Abraham exists, He is an utter psychopath--and the God of Nature too. If you can't see these things just by looking, you have simply closed your eyes to the realities of our world.

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.

Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

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.

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.