The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.
You notice how liberals keep saying, ‘If only Islam would have a Reformation’ – it can’t have one. It says it can’t. It’s extremely dangerous in that way.
A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.
A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people’s hope.
When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I’m in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn’t feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.
Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.
I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.
I’ve proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.
In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.
It’s surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.
Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.
Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.
Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.
The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.
The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.
Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, ‘Well, good on you. See you there.’
You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can’t be English American. Why not?
Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.
No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.
Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.