“The idea which we so often hear expressed in the Western world, that’s how they are, that’s how they will always be and they can’t do anything else.”

In the one sense, it denotes a religion, as system of beliefs and worship; in the other, the civilization that grew up and flourished under the aegis of that religion.

Mustafa Kemal’s government was certainly authoritarian, but he had a saying which is profoundly true.

When we talk about the Judeo-Christian or the Judeo-Muslim tradition, it’s important to remember that we are speaking of a Jewish component of civilization, but not in itself a civilization.

For him (Ahmadinejad), Mutual Assured Destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement.

To accept the story of the Arab destruction of the library of Alexandria, one must explain how it is that so dramatic an event was unmentioned and unnoticed not only in the rich historical literature of medieval Islam.

In the past, foreign intervention was obviously a major problem. Foreign domination, or if not domination, interference. But that has ended. There is no foreign domination; there is minimal foreign interference. The Cold War has ended. The Soviet Union no longer exists.

Very often we mean the same thing. But what we do mean, what in the Western world we call human rights, in the Islamic world, they don’t talk about rights. Now they do, but in the past they didn’t. It wasn’t part of their terminology. But really it’s the same thing.

In opposing we always talk about freedom in the Western world, Muslims always talk about justice.

A remarkable feature of Islam is that it gives dignity even to the humblest illiterate peasants. It gives them a certain human dignity which one doesn’t find in other societies.

Christians and Muslims share the belief that they are the fortunate recipient of the final God message.

In the Christian world, as you remember, Christianity is in the 21st century, Islam is in the 15th century. I don’t mean to say that Islam is backward; I mean to say that there are certain experiences that it hasn’t gone through.

I think that the growing government control of the press is very clear. Turkey is still not a dictatorship, there is still some freedom of the press, but I think it’s moving in the wrong direction.

Moses led his people through the wilderness and he wasn’t permitted to enter the Promised Land. Jesus was crucified.

I mean now you have Muslims in the Muslim world who can compare their situations with people elsewhere and they find that very humiliating.

And I think there is a growing awareness of this among Christians and among Jews, and even to some extent to some Muslims. That’s happening for obvious reasons.

Islam explicitly rejects dictatorship and there are no traditions of the Prophet or passages in the Qur’an which clearly give dictators this support.

We don’t owe America anything – America owes us.

I don’t watch anything on a regular basis – I tend to binge-watch things.

That was the first thing I was struck by, not by the acting, not by anything else, but by the physicality.

“To be or not to be is” [by William Shakespeare] beyond anything I can comprehend.

You hear anything? Oh, let’s run! It’s Virginia today!”…

Opinions I have about anything are in my personal life.

I don’t regret anything. I feel like I’ve made what I would call mistakes.

I’ve never done anything else in my life other than preach and be an activist. Way before I was known.