“Philosophers have a long tradition of marrying stupid women, from Socrates on. They think it clever.”

“People get stupid when they're in love; people want what they can't have; and the years between ages twelve and eighteen always, always suck.”

“Life is filled with rhythms-day and night, hot and cold, summer and winter, spring and fall, cloudy and clear. Likewise in a relationship, men and women have their own rhythms and cycles.”

“A person comes into the world with a fist-and a grasp. Yes, we are built to fight one another, but also to embrace. How cleverly we are created.”

“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him,' the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said. 'It's clear that Wittgenstein hadn't spent much time with lions,' commented the gambler and conservationist John Aspinall.”

“A common error of western commentators who seek to interpret Islamism sympathetically is to view it as a form of localised resistance to globalisation. In fact, Islamism is also a universalist political project. Along with Neoliberals and Marxists, Islamists are participants in a dispute about how the world as whole is to be governed. None is ready to entertain the possibility that it should always contain a diversity of regimes. On this point, they differ from non-western traditions of thinking in India, China and Japan, which are much more restrained in making universal claims.In their unshakeable faith that one way of living is best for all humankind, the chief protagonists in the dispute about political Islam belong to a way of thinking that is quintessentially western. As in Cold War times, we are led to believe we are locked in a clash of civilisations: the West against the rest. In truth, the ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western family quarrel.”

“Long after the traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up.The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.”