“The literal mind can never understand the ironic mind.”

“The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.”

“Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.”

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

“Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.”

“Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul.”

“Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell.”