Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. ::"The Politics of Ignorance" (2005)

Nothing is more sacred than the facts. ::The End of Faith (2004), page 225

It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.

It is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.

Most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths.

The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.

A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life.

Beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potentia.

To believe that God exists is to believe that I stand in some relation to his existence such that his existence is itself the reason for my belief.