I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It's very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.

My friend Lou Reed came to the end of his song. So very sad.But hey, Lou, you'll always take a walk on the wild side. Always a perfect day.

The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.

People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas - because otherwise we're all done.

This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages. It's still in the fifteenth century or whatever. And Christianity in the fifteenth century, after all, was full of inquisitions and burnings at the stake, and so on and so on. So give Islam time, and it will reach the point of maturity that other religions have. But Mormonism is much younger than Islam, and it's got there already. So I don't think that's an argument that works.

He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of green-tinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.