I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.
Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting 'O.K.' has deposed the more affirmative 'Yes,' so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of 'like' are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.
Well, we can't say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it.
Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.
Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.
Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.
The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.
There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.
No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.
The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved.
The violence in the Bible is appalling.
The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.
You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?
I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, this can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.
I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.
It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.
The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.
When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,' and so forth, I switch off quite early.