“I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.”
Respect“Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, 'Well, good on you. See you there.'”
Death“I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.”
Respect“Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.”
Religion“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.”
Great“Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.”
Religion“And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.”
Family“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.”
Hope“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.”
God“I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.”
Religion“I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.”
Power“High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.”
Great“There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise.”
Faith“Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.”
Technology“The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.”
Home“I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap.”
War“If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it's a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.”
Society“I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.”
War“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.”
Great“Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.”
Faith“In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.”
Relationship“'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.”
Age