And in this relentlessly unfolding series of interactions, the U.S. has played a very distinctive role, which most Americans have been either shielded from or simply unaware of.

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.

History is written by those who win and those who dominate.

You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit

Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.

No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.

Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.

We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.

Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.

The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.

My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.

On Titan the molecules that have been raining down like manna from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there largely unaltered deep-frozen awaiting the chemists from Earth

The spirit of imagination smells exactly how the person inhaling it imagines it to smell.

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

I went to see that movie 'From Hell,' or as Osama bin Laden calls it - 'Roots.'

Our belief or disbelief of a thing does not alter the nature of the thing.

My mother encouraged me to be artistic. It was written in a contract at an early age that I would be an artist.

I've been so blessed to have my career gradually get bigger and bigger, so I've been able to absorb stuff and take stuff gradually.

They paint you red before they sacrifice you. It's a different religion from ours - I think.

Wealth cannot make a life, but Love.

Teasing out the way the world might look through another's eyes is what makes the creative process so fascinating and enjoyable.