"Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss."

"Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about."

"You still don't like the idea of gay marriage? Then, as my friend the economist Julianne Malveaux says: Don't marry a gay person. Case closed, problem solved."

"The religions that fascinate me and, you know, could possibly tempt me are not the ones that involve faith or belief. They're the ones that offer you the opportunity to know the spirit or deity."

"We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world’s preeminent democracy, after all, if the large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship."

"You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man."

"To acknowledge the existence of other people is also to acknowledge that they are not reliable sources of safety or comfort."

"At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame."

"I believe nothing. Belief is intellectual surrender; “faith” a state of willed self-delusion."

"I couldn't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to 'confront [my] mortality' bore a striking resemblance to the mall."

"According to a recent poll [...] 94% of Americans agree that "people who work fulltime should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty."

"I routinely oscillate between exultation and despair. Maybe at the end of the day I feel pretty good about what I've written, but the next morning I see that it's crap. Then I start again - make a new outline, do some more research, try to rethink the whole question."

"There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?"

"In fact, if you're not prepared to die when you're almost sixty, then I would say you've been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being."

"Morality, as far as I could see, originates in atheism and the realization that no higher power is coming along to feed the hungry or lift the fallen. Mercy is left entirely to us."

"In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites."

"Mostly I saw her efforts to induct me into adulthood much as a calf might see its mother’s explanations of veal: I was being recruited into the great death march of biology—be born, reproduce, die."

"As far as I can see, even now, after years of puzzling over the field of cognitive science, there is no clear line between entities to which science attributes mind and those it regards as mindless mechanisms."

"No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on."

"I had discovered that writing--with whatever instrument--was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do."

"If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well."

"Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around."

"I think the anti-Wal-Mart is Costco, which pays much better and has much better health benefits and which is profitable and offers low prices."

"I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, 'Why are we here? What is this business? We're alive for a few short decades and then poof, we're out of here.'"

"Our atheism family tradition is traced to a - I don't know if it was great-great or a great-great-great grandmother who was a poor Irish-American woman in the 1880s in western Montana."

"I became a student of the history of religion. I am fascinated by how religions often center on mystical experience, and in the Old Testament tradition you find flames, the burning bush."

"I'm interested in what bonds people together. You know, what brings us together in good ways? And there's not a lot known about that."

"If I get incensed about some injustice, you can't make me - I will not just going to sit at my desk, at my computer all the time. I - I might want to march out on that."

"In 2001, I was being treated for breast cancer, and I was pretty sure I was going to recover."

"I haven't seen much socially redeeming about religion. I'm an atheist. I don't here want to get into the Hitchens- or Dawkins-style attack on religion. I was raised on that. It's boring."

"People tend to judge presidents on how the economy performs, and yet we don't expect them to have the power to do much about it. Or we don't want them to exercise that power, if they were to have it."

"Experimental science is fascinating, but I don't want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I'll read about it."

"If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other people's, then that must feel pretty good."

"So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests."

"You can't go around telling people, 'I'm on a mission to discover the purpose of life.' Not if you're hoping to prolong the conversation."

"The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education."

"It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar."

"I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that's really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it's very different. You're out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn't that fascinating."

"In 1993, 89 of the 'Fortune' top 100 companies were administering the Myers-Briggs test to their employees. The philosophy behind personality tests is that they don't want you to be in the wrong kind of job. The tests have been completely exposed as nonsense."

"When I was 17, I had an experience that I later learned could be called a 'mystical experience.' It was almost violent. No faces, voices, nothing like that. It is like the world burst and flamed into life all around me. That is not a great image, but it is as good as I will ever do."