“I call myself a liberal – a classical liberal as in John Stuart Mill.”

Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.

The mistake that the Bush administration should admit to is not so much that they made the wrong choices. They made the right analysis; they made the right choices. But what they did wrong was the execution of those choices. That was wrong.

Americans have always welcomed people of all backgrounds, religions, and races. It’s a spirit of tolerance, now energized and amplified by the cult of multiculturalism.

Let us recognize that we can no longer tolerate violent oppression of women in the name of religion and culture any more than we would tolerate violent oppression espoused by any other bully in the name of a twisted rationale.

Where there is no freedom of speech, there is no conscience.

Avoiding offense means that we don’t accept each other as equals.

My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam.

I have had to pay a price for leaving Islam and for speaking out. I have to pay for round-the-clock security because of the death threats against me.

As a woman you are better off in life earning your own money. You couldn’t prevent your husband from leaving you or taking another wife, but you could have some of your dignity if you didn’t have to beg him for financial support.

I’d love to go and visit the Mosque in Mecca again, just for the sheer beauty of it, not for God – much the way a non-Catholic might go to Vatican City because of the beauty of the buildings and the artifacts.

I don’t believe there is such a thing as ‘moderate Islam.’ I think it’s better to talk about degrees of belief and degrees of practice.

After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.

I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.

I lived in countries that had no democracy. so I don’t find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don’t know what it is not to have freedom.

Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.

In 1985 as a teenager in Kenya, I was an adamant member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Britain is the home of economic freedom, with liberty guaranteed by the independence of our state institutions, and an absence of corruption assured by transparency.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

The mind of the scholar, if he would leave it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds.

Bob Rubin was opposed to signing the welfare bill. He’s not exactly what I call a flaming liberal.

He has left them in the full enjoyment of their liberal positions, and he is himself a strict conservative of their garments.

The one thing people are the most liberal with, is their advice.

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.