To terrify children with the image of hell... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?
Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.
All the time, I've felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn't.
The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.
For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.
A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I'm crepuscular.
Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.
The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.
Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.
I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.
The term 'the American Left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.
The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.
The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.
Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.
Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.
I'm not a sheep.
Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.
I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does.
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.
I vote and I do jury duty.
