"The barbarian loves his own pride, and hates, or disbelieves in, the pride of others. I will be a civilized being, I will love the pride of my adversaries, of my servants, and my lover; and my house shall be, in all humility, in the wilderness a civilized place."

"It was the first and only fight of his childhood, but it had taught him a valuable lesson about human nature, how people were just another species of animal, and like any animal, from the biggest predators, to the smallest scavengers, most human beings could only be pushed so far before they lashed out."

"The question, therefore, is not whether one should teach philosophy to Muslim students, but rather what kind or kinds of philosophy should be taught and how the subject should be approached."

"Don’t speak of action [effect]. Don’t serve the action [effect]. It is a result. But serve the causes [do the causes]. Nothing will be achieved unless you serve the cause."

"No one, I fancy, would discredit a story that the Archbishop of Canterbury slipped on a banana skin merely because he found that a similar comic mishap had been reported of many people, and especially of elderly gentlemen of dignity."

"The fact that people in Hollywood are open to what I teach is not because they're more desperate than anyone else, but because they're more touched by it. That's not their weakness. It's their strength!"

"Consciousness is a state of existence where subjects are aware of their surroundings and can respond to its demands according to internal and external perceptions."

"As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about."