“We should be cautiously open to the spiritual and non-rational, and skeptical of the more invisible magical thinking—what we might call “magical reason”—pervading secular thought and experience in modern society. Science and technology are for most people a new religion, and their orthodoxies are believed with the same fervor.”

“We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it... But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity.”

“People who go to Disney who have magic in themselves experience magic there, just as people who go to the grocery store who have magic in themselves experience magic at the grocery store. The principle is simple: fun, joy, and happiness, are something we bring to life, not something life, circumstance, or situation bring to us. There are truly no magic kingdoms, only magic people. Fun, joy and happiness are choices, orientations, approaches, attitudes, a way of living in the world, not the world itself...”

“Should we tolerate the blatant incorrectness of religion? Tolerating ignorance, superstition and stupidity will not provide for a healthy advancement of our society. Religion is cancer for modern thought, rationality, and even common sense.”

“Everything is relative' said the cosmic onion. 'Well, you're no relative of mine', said Dougal, huffily. - The Magic Roundabout”

“We’re constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.”

“I call hellfire a threat,” Natasha said, “ and ‘love thy neighbor’ a value. But I believe in hell, or something close to it. I think hell is what we get right here on earth when people trade their spiritual and political values in on spiritual and political threats.”