What they [the 9/11 attackers] abominate about 'the west', to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.

The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.

Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.

I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.

What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.

There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.