Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented. (108)

For more than a thousand years, they had lived in the shadow of an illusion--almost a religion. and, like any religion, if had preformed an essential role in their society; it had given them goals beyond themselves, and a purpose to their lives. (138)

He's a creature of today--not haunted by the past or fearful of the future. (163)

Without supernatural sanctions to restrain them, men might never have cooperated in anything larger than tribal units. Not until it became corrupted by power and privilege did religion become an essentially antisocial force, the great good it had done being eclipsed by greater evils. (203)

Bad things happened as often as good; as had long been suspected, the universe simply obeyed the laws of mathematical probability. Certainly there was no sign of any supernatural intervention, either for good or ill. (206)

Virtually all thinking men had finally come to with the harsh verdict of the great philosopher Lucretius: all religions were fundamentally immoral, because the superstitions they peddled wrought more evil than good. (206)

She felt that she was hearing the sea of space wash upon the shores of all its worlds--a sound terrifying in its meaningless futility as if reverberated through the aching emptiness of the universe. (216)