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

No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine

Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things.

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

Of course, I do everything for money.

To what faults do you feel most indulgent? To the ones that arise from urgent material needs.

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.