What I am is what I am. Are you what you are - or what?
The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.
Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.
In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We're only one God away from total agreement.
Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.
Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.
Begin to recognize prosperity everywhere, and rejoice in it.
The problem right now, which I've been pointing out very bluntly to American officials in Washington, is that the U. S. has no economic presence in Afghanistan. The Afghans can't point and say, "Oh, the Americans built that road. They built that telecommunications facility. They built that electricity powerhouse," because nothing has been built so far.
I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realize how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.
I think that there is an air of experience and aesthetic sophistication that weaves in with the amateur aspects of the film [Dream of Life]; it gives the film a certain elegance.