Sip the shame so you won't have to guzzle the regret.
British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.
The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.
Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into being the Muslim culture I'd dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture which is what I've always understood as freedom. . . . Actually Existing Islam. . . which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in.
Not that I have any little kids running around I need to keep away from the guns. I had any kids I'd get rid of the guns. Nothing more dangerous to the life of a child than a house full of firearms. Nothing more dangerous except maybe a parent.
I do not believe that the values which the Western democracies consider essential to civilization can survive in a world rent by the international anarchy of nationalism and the economic anarchy of competitive enterprise.
You can't be everything. Nobody is everything. You just do what you do, and you try to do that as well as you can. And if somebody doesn't like it, too bad.
If you are unable to understand the cause of a problem it is impossible to solve it.