“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.”

Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

No one in the American Enterprise imposes their beliefs. We clash, and I think that’s what the West is all about.

Of course, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists or sympathetic to terrorists. Equating all Muslims with terrorism is stupid and wrong. But acknowledging that there is a link between Islam and terror is appropriate and necessary.

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 don’t know how you are so familiar to me-or why it feels less like I am getting to know you and more as though I am remembering who you are. How every smile, every whisper brings me closer to the impossible conclusion that I have known you before, I have loved you before-in another time, a different place, some other existence.

Souls do not have calendars or clocks, nor do they understand the notion of time or distance. They only know it feels right to know one other.

In a sea of strangers, you’ve longed to know me. Your life spent sailing to my shores.

Nobody can guarantee the real terms per pupil funding increase. In the Labour party’s manifesto we know the figures don’t add up.

Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.

Perhaps our own opposition to even the level of European integration we have now, let alone any more, is well known.

We all know the stories about the Human Rights Act. About the illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because, and I am not making this up, he had a pet cat.

I know there are some voices calling for a punitive deal that punishes Britain. That would be an act of calamitous self-harm for the countries of Europe, and it would not be the act of a friend.