“If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.”

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.

You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.

We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.

In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.

A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.

Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

Two things form the bedrock of any open society – freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.

Can you blame me if I am pursued by the thought of how much we could do to remedy social evils, if only we had an honest and disinterested press?

In the beginning there were two primal spirits,Twins spontaneously active,These are the Good and the Evil, in thought, and in word, and in deed.

In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no ‘two evils’ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.

Be thou good thyself, and let people speak evil of thee; it is better than to be wicked, and that they should consider thee as good.

Nobody knows if Zidane is an angel or demon. He smiles like Saint Teresa and grimaces like a serial killer.

Men are slower to recognize blessings than evils.

There must be a remedy even for such a crying evil as this [abortion]. But where shall it be found, at least where begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of women?

We must remember that Satan has his miracles, too.