“In order for answers to become clear, the questions have to be clear.”

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.

If a group of people feels that it has been humiliated and that its honour has been trampled underfoot, it will want to express its identity and this expression of an identity will take different shapes and forms.

In many of the things that people do, they themselves are the centre of attention, but they inscribe some other name on their banner.

As a result of the awareness and consciousness of decline, an awareness and consciousness of a national ethnicity or an Islamic identity also came into being.

Energy is a concept that has been coined by physicists. There is no observable thing known as energy anywhere.

We must break problems down into small, digestible bits. We must define the concepts that we use and explain what components they consist of. We must tackle small problems.

Establishing an equilibrium between the Islam of truth and Islam as an identity is one of the most difficult tasks of religious intellectuals.

Compromise has a negative connotation.

People first concern themselves with meeting their basic needs; only afterwards, do they pursue any higher needs.

My short answer would be that there is no greatest jazz musician of the century. Jazz, like any valid art form, finds its greatness in its expression of the human spirit, and, to me, this can’t be reduced to a contest.

Free markets. What does this system mean? The answer is simple: it is the market economy, it is the system in which the cooperation of individuals in the social division of labor is achieved by the market.

The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.

Read! Study never stops because publications never stop coming in. It’s read and study. And think about what you’re studying. Take it apart and put it together. Ask ‘why?’ And know the answers.

My standard answer is that I have the same struggle as any working parent but with the good fortune to be working at my dream job. Or sometimes I just hand them a juicy red apple I’ve poisoned in my working-mother witch cauldron and fly away.

In Britain the government has to come down in front of Parliament every day to explain its actions, but here the President never answers directly to Congress.

Jesus didn’t come to tell us the answers to the questions of life, he came to be the answer.

I’m no longer prepared to accept what people say and what’s written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.