I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.

Without water we are nothing", the traveler thought. "Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.

If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game otherwise she'd make mincemeat of you.

If Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.

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.