One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.

Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.

The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.

faith without doubt is addiction

What we expect, that we find.

How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?

Everyone is aware that most of the built environment today lacks a natural order, an order which presents itself very strongly in places that were built centuries ago

Comedy born of bewilderment is the only comedy that should be in magic.

There we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.

We recognize the touch of the Opera ghost.

Although the mass of the people accepted the white man's God, either under physical duress or because he seemed more powerful than their own Gods, they never assimilated the ideas of Christianity.

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching.

It was karma, it was kismet, it was magic. It doesn't matter how it happened, just that it did.

Today, the religion clauses of the First Amendment do not need to be fixed; they need to be followed.