To respect Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him... If dissent is now also to be thought of as a form of 'dissing,' then we have indeed succumbed to the thought police.

I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, 'soul.'

Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.

It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.

If you're on a freeway and want to know if you're being followed, what you do is enormously vary your speed. You accelerate to 100 and slow down to 30 and then accelerate again. In a city, you make a lot of turns against the stream of traffic. You go around a roundabout twice.

You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.

As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger self's dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course.