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

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.

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

In time of war the first casualty is truth.

The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.

The search for human freedom can never be complete without freedom for women.

The first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

Then I go back and listen to it and for the first time, hear what I just did. It’s like Elvis has left the building while the thing is happening.

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

Grub first, then ethics.