The whole reason for the success of Dr. King's civil-rights movement was that it was not a movement for itself. The civil-rights movement understood very clearly, and stated very beautifully, that it was a question of humanism, not a sectarian movement at all.

In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.

If the Qur'an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.

Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect.

How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?

Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.