Wisdom worth sharing, words worth remembering.
A lot of people because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed to be the repository of other people's hope.
The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win – it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition.
The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.
I think the materialist conception of history is valid.
'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class apart from redneck which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.
The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity to put it simply.
One of the great questions of philosophy is do we innately have morality or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.
When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – 'I must just tell you my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest' and so forth I switch off quite early.
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
A good day is one where I can not just read a book but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I'm crepuscular.
Well I'll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.
Well we can't say any more than we can say there is no god there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it.