Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

The Iranian people were converted to Islam not very much longer after the conquest of the Arab world by Islam, but they refused to adopt the Arabic language, and it's a great point of pride to them that Persian culture and the Persian language and Persian literature survived the conversion to Islam. And the conversion to Islam also was for most of them not the Sunni majority form, but the Shia one. So there's a great discrepancy between Iranian society and many other of what we think of as Arab Muslim States and systems.

The Iraqi Baath Socialist Party was modelled in large part on admiration for European National Socialist and Fascist movements, hoped to emulate them especially in their nationalism against the West. But mutated by Saddam Hussein it became also one that very, very much admired, and grew a special moustache in admiration of the work of Yosif Vissarionovitch Dzugashvili, the great Georgian known to us historically as Stalin. So you had him in modern Iraq, a regime in our own time, that was openly, directly modelled upon the two most extreme examples of European totalitarianism.

Those who had alleged that a million civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam!

It's a better tradition for people who think for themselves and who don't pray in aid of any supernatural authority. That's what you should be spending your life is in spreading and deepening that tradition.

It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who you don’t know but who are unbelievers and say, ‘Now are you gonna change your mind?’ That is considered almost a polite question.