‘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.

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.

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

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.

There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.

I'm optimistic yet disillusioned, hopeful yet frustrated.

I have the strangest thoughts in my head, maybe I should not write them down.

Nature has no reverence towards life. Nature treats life as though it were the most valueless thing in the world.... Nature does not act by purposes.

The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.

Collaboration gets me excited.

If you have got a living force and you're not using it, nature kicks you back. The blood boils just like you put it in a pot.

I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.

No matter how long the room has been dark, an hour or a million years, the moment the lamp of awareness is lit the entire room becomes luminous. You are that luminosity. You are that clear light.

To be ambitious of true honor, of the true glory and perfection of our natures, is the very principle and incentive of virtue.