“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.”

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.

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.

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

A physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees.

In the studio the director controls the actor’s every move, every inflection, every expression.

Cantona’s expression speaking the whole French dictionary without saying a word.

What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata.

Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical term. It offers me an visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.

And in a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.

I think we have to stop using the expression “alt-right.” It’s ridiculous. It’s racist, fascist, nationalist.

Everything you do counts forever. You are an expression of the whole process of creation; you are a cocreator.