In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don't kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

When I look back on what I did for the Left, I'm in a small way quite proud of some of it - I only wish I'd done more.

The Islamists will try to spoil everything for everyone.

I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime.

I've proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it's the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there's not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

The most genius thing about the way I create is to create with other geniuses.

There is in every intellect a natural exigency for a true concept of God: we are born with the thirst to know and to see Him, and therefore it cannot be otherwise.

Even the piquant can forfeit popularity if tied to something intellectual.

Don't think you can persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.

The intellectual, the man of thought, doubt and analysis, should give the best of himself.

There is a gulf between the Arab peoples and Arab intellectuals.

We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.

We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.

Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

“It is a question of cubic capacity," said he; "a man with so large a brain must have something in it.”