Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer; it's just to annoy you.

We live in an age where the rate of change has been colossal. Colossal. Almost every week there's some transformation of some kind, whether technological or political or scientific, whatever. And I think it's bewildering to human beings to live in a time when they can't take anything as fixed - when everything is shifting and changing all the time.

In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that's happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.

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

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.