In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.

Quite interesting, North Korea is as if it's an entirely secular dictatorship. In North Korea you might think that was the case since it has an officially Communistic ideology, but it's not, it's the most religious state it's possible to imagine. It's actually two people who have been fused into one, maybe this is reminding you of something, there's the father and there's the son. It's one short of a trinity.

I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.

She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.

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.

Happiness is fleeting and life is brief, but we know that, nonetheless, life can be savored and that happiness, even of the ecstatic kind, is available to us.

Ruthless and arrogant though power can appear, it is only ever held by mere mammals who excrete and yearn, and who suffer from insomnia and insecurity. These mammals are also necessarily vain in the ­extreme, and often wish to be liked almost as much as they desire to be feared.