I am dealing with people with both sides. I see people who are liberating themselves but they want to forget the world. And I see people who want to liberate the world but they forget themselves. Neither is the way I want to go.

When I am talking to people from Germany, we should know that there are certain things and certain histories that are very important for people. If you look at all the Muslims living in the West, they didn't react in a violent way. They don't like what they saw but they are citizens like you and me and they look at it and say: "This is a silly video but we are not going to react."

Integration is a word of the past, the word of the future and the word of the present is contribution.

Feeling sympathy and searching for explanations isn't the same as believing that the violence is justified.

One does not always know how to express the sorrow of the soul. One does not always know how to silence the joy of the heart.

Just take Germany and the suffering of Jews during and after the Second World War. It would be legal to ridicule and to laugh at this suffering, but since it was such a trauma on the European conscience, no one is going to do it. It is an open scar, an open wound, an open reality.

The philosophy of fasting calls upon us to know ourselves, to master ourselves, and to discipline ourselves the better to free ourselves. To fast is to identify our dependencies, and free ourselves from them.