Religions are, for the most part, bad-but religion is not.

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance — and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism.

The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.

People who have failed at Christianity aren't likely to make great Buddhists.

Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests.

I think, therefore I am … not a Christian.

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.

What I’ve got to talk about, I don’t think a priest wants to hear. What does a priest know or care about secular concerns? All they want to talk about is God. All they want to hear is a tidy list of sins so that they can prescribe their penances and get on to the next customer.

Secular society has been unfairly impoverished by the loss of an array of practices and themes which atheists typically find it impossible to live with because they seem too closely associated with, to quote Nietzsche’s useful phrase, ‘the bad odours of religion’. We have grown frightened of the word morality. We bridle at the thought of hearing a sermon. We flee from the idea that art should be uplifting or have an ethical mission. We don’t go on pilgrimages. We can’t build temples. We have no mechanisms for expressing gratitude. Strangers rarely sing together. We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.

It is the high priests that make demands — not the gods they serve.

He’d seen theocracies all over paratime, and liked none of them; priests in political power usually made themselves insufferable, worse than any secular despotism.

We recognize no infallible Pope, not even a literary one.

[I am] secular to the bones, but not an atheist.

...all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.