“Whatever else their faults may be, they were not radical Islamist states – Iraq was not, Syria is not, Libya was not. The most radical fundamentalist Islamist state is, of course, your America’s Saudi Arabia.”

He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.

Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.

Anything’s possible in Human Nature …Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.

Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.

The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.

Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries.

The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government’s policies, that are so hated.

There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

When people say “the people” or “the public” as though it’s the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.

Every people, every society, needs a culture of resistance, a culture of being difficult and disobedient, that is the only way they will ever be able to stand up to the inevitable abuse of power by whoever runs the state apparatus, the capitalists, the communists, the socialists, the Gandhians, whoever.

That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

I am a woman who is a granddaughter of a lady who used to be beaten on the head by her husband, of a mother who went through hell because she was divorced and had to bring up these kids. And I can take 10 men out to lunch and pay the bill, and nobody even thinks twice about it. So don’t mess with me.

Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.

The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.

How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain’s festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international con�icts of today.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

No matter who you are, where you’ve come from, what you’ve been through. You can make a difference in this world.

In charity, every little bit works. You can’t change the world. You can’t do everything. But you sure try to bring awareness and do as much as you can.

The difference between winners and losers is that winners do things losers don’t want to do.

There’s nothing like the feeling of knowing that you’ve made a difference in someone’s life, even if that difference is a lifetime of nightmares and a fortune in therapy bills.

A man ought to get all he can earn. A man who knows he’s making money for other people ought to get some of the profit he brings in. Don’t make any difference if it’s baseball or a bank or a vaudeville show. It’s business, I tell you. There ain’t no sentiment to it. Forget that stuff.

I never said to be like me, I say to be like you and make a difference.

There is no difference between the worry of a human mother and an animal mother for their offspring. A mother’s love does not derive from the intellect but from the emotions, in animals just as in humans.