We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

It would be deeply depressing if the only way children could get moral values was from religion. Either from scripture, and God knows we don't want them to get…

We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?

Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has…

Most days I wake up thinking I'm the luckiest bastard alive.

Some days you're the pigeon, some days you're the statue.

The best break anybody ever gets is in bein' alive in the first place. An' you don't unnerstan' what a perfect deal it is until you realizes that you ain't gon…