"You may not have money, you may not have medicine, you may not have miracles, but you do have words, and they can produce life, or death depending on how you use them."

"If one religion were 'true,' we would expect to see, even if only once in all of recorded history, a religious missionary that had stumbled upon a culture that shared the same revelations — brought forth by the same deity."

"The sun gives us light but the moon provides inspiration. If you look at the sun without shielding your eyes you'll go blind. If you look at the moon without covering your eyes you'll become a poet."

"I'm sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, 'Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol.' To which I always respond, 'I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?"

"There is a lot of work out there to take people out of the loop in things like medical diagnosis. But if you are taking humans out of the loop, you are in danger of ending up with a very cold form of AI that really has no sense of human interest, human emotions, or human values."