Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.

This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. . . . In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.

There is almost no country in Africa where it is not essential to know to which tribe, or which subgroup of which tribe, the president belongs. From this single piece of information you can trace the lines of patronage and allegiance that define the state.

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.