“It's my life, I'll believe what I want to believe. It's your life, you believe what you want to believe. That doesn't mean we can't get along.”

“Belief overflows to behavior. First we need to change what we believe. when we truly change what we believe, we'll gladly change how we behave.”

“If you absolutely believe that what you do is right, you're bullet-proof.”

“John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [...]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's.”

“Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.”

“That's why I believe in a Constitution which separates church from state. I've seen what happens when they get in cahoots.”

“I believe you need to be educated on what you want to do in life, but I don't believe you necessarily need collage to get there.”