"The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself."

"I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap."

"The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win - it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition."

"When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,' and so forth, I switch off quite early."

"Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?"

"But I think it's quite clear in my work that my orientation isn't political or doesn't come out of modern politics."

"Fortitude is the quiet voice at eventide saying: I will try once more tomorrow. For where clarity resides, peace inevitably follows."

"Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics."