It is easy to be a moral perfectionist when one is politically unaccountable.

Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment.

What happened on September 11th is at least, theoretically, small stuff compared to what can happen.

If you look at the history of the U.S., we were an empire long before we were a nation.

It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless.

The more dynamic the capitalistic expansion, the greater the disparity. It is from the disparity that we are going to get all the political upheaval for the next few years.

Prostitution, black marketeering, and informing on ones neighbors and friends all had such a deep-rooted tradition in Romania that there was a charming naturalness and innocence about it.

It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism.

Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism.

It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century.

What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate?

If you live with the limited beliefs of your mind, you cannot see life, beyond the physical existence, while in reality, the life happens at a much deeper level.

A lot of the problems teenagers go through, it's better for them to go through them on their own. If you always have a crutch, you don't learn anything.

Know you got a roommate, call me when it's no one there. Put the key under the mat and you know I'll be over there

Of all knaves the religious knave is the worst.

Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time." "Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly.

The truthe wakes up once and never dies.

The single most important lesson I learned is that black people are the cause of black people's demise.

I don't think I've ever had a plan or direction for myself. I've actually made decisions based more on what I didn't want to do than what I wanted to do.

I prefer lies to truth, especially when the lies are about me.

Tawbah is the cleaning of the heart, dhikr is the feeding of the heart.