“Someone sitting on a completely unreasonable belief is sitting on a time bomb. The apparently harmless, idiosyncratic belief of the Catholic Church that one thing may have the substance of another, although it displays absolutely none of its empirical qualities, prepares people for the view that some people are agents of Satan in disguise, which in turn makes it reasonable to destroy them.”

“Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them, and an avalanche of afflictions or ailments succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor.”

“Sasha,' Kessligh said around his mouthful, 'if you'd seen as many people killed as I have, all because one of them believes this thing and the other believes this other thing, you wouldn't think it was all so harmless. Tales and legends are fun, but beliefs, Sasha. Beliefs are dangerous. Be careful what you believe in, for beliefs are far more dangerous then swords.”

“The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe." "As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe... Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.”

“The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.”

“People have this belief that what we believe is the effect of the facts that we’re exposed to, and therefore, if we expose people to different and newer facts, they will change their beliefs. This is not true. […]The contents of people’s minds, the belief systems that they hold, are in no way, shape or form a result of any objective evaluation of information. The prejudices are inherited. They are socially inflicted. They are propagandized in school, in church, in communities, in families. They are reinforced by endless bouts of patriotic media and other sorts of nonsense. People are just an emotional Gordian knot, kaleidoscopic clusterfrack of prior prejudices [which have been] stuffed into their heads and held aloft by the spears of social approval or ostracism. Everybody is prejudiced, almost, and everybody maintains those prejudices for fear of social attack, ostracism, or disapproval.Because people haven’t been reasoned into their beliefs, they can’t be reasoned out of their beliefs, [and] when people have existing prejudices, showing them facts that run counter to those prejudices does not dislodge them. In fact, statistically, it is more likely to make those prejudices stronger.”