The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.

Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.

Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.

An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence

In one was, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely this reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.