“Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.”

“Islam is a religion based upon knowledge, and a denial of the possibility and objectivity of knowledge would involve the destruction of the fundamental basis upon which not only the religion, but all the sciences are rooted.”

“Yet the extravagant enthusiasm for profit persisted among businessmen. In the spring of 1969 Senator Long [spoke out against] a partisan of the oil industry...[and] that further taxation of oil profits would be disastrous. Such taxes... would remove "all business inventive and lead to Thursday to Tuesday weekends, wife swapping and drinking." Without the lure of profit, work would thus become meaningless. Americans would become pagan again and evils would prevail much like those that had inflamed Captain Endicott three centuries earlier”

“Optimism is denial for chumps with no life experience"."What's pessimism?" I said."Religion without God.”

“Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. (To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.)”

“I must not, like the quietists, reduce all religion to a denial of any specific action, despising all other means, since what makes perfection is God's order, and the means he ordains is best for the soul.”