Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.

What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.

Those who want to be offended don't have the right to try and close down the newspaper that offends them.

It's called faith because it's not knowledge.

The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.

The prostitute journalist is a familiar and well-understood figure in the Middle East, and Saddam Hussein's regime made lavish use of the buyability of the regional press. Now we, too, have hired that clapped-out old floozy, Miss Rosie Scenario, and sent her whoring through the streets.

In one way, traveling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight. This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people. In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere.