Those who constantly qualify everything and have no opinions of their own are ultimately just as incapable of tolerance.

History shows us a lot of things. It shows why the Lord's Prayer includes the supplication: "And lead us not into temptation." In my day, dissertations were still written by hand, or drummed out with a typewriter. In the past, you had to round up the literature, find the books and find the passages. Nowadays you click on Wikipedia or Google and you have everything you need. This probably makes it more difficult to resist temptation.

I don't want to interpret the pope's words, especially as I am one of those horrible people who fell away from the Roman church after Martin Luther.

We were always faced with questions like: What about a religious community like Milli Görüs, which is represented by the Islamic Council? And what about the Central Council of Muslims? But we don't wish to exclude people from the start.

The United States lived on borrowed money for too long, inflating its financial sector unnecessarily and neglecting its small and mid-sized industrial companies.

In China, it was always said that a double-digit rate of growth would be dangerous. Now, the country has a growth rate of 6.9 percent and suddenly that is supposed to be a catastrophe for the global economy.

I can't think of many other laws we might need. For now, though, we'll be talking to German Muslims over issues of coexistence.