Reasons for declaring belief is not are not the same as reasons for believing in god.

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.

Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.

There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.

What you can imagine depends on what you know.

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly.

Wrapped in a mother’s love is the most beautiful and safest place on earth for a child.

No one is a failure until that is the only definition of themselves that they are willing to see within.

Whatever you do you need courage. ... To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs.

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.

But since he had The genius to be loved, why let him have The justice to be honoured in his grave.

After September 11, it became unpatriotic to question any homeland-security or defense spending, and that let things get out of control.

It's the choosing that's important, isn't it?

Several things about Reagan are unusual in a public man. He was not a typical politician at all, but a private man in public life.

Being a good psychoanalyst has the same disadvantage as being a good parent: The children desert one as they grow up.

The problem with the Australian practice of abortion is that an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother’s convenience.