La riqueza no se mide por las cosas que se poseen sino por aquellas de las que sabemos prescindir.

Next to your beloved, Khayyam, how alone you are! Now that she is gone, you can take refuge in her.

What we need to do is enter sensibly into an age of liberty and peaceful diversity, casting aside the injustices of the past without replacing them by new ones or by other kinds of exclusion or intolerance, and recognising the right of everyone to include several linguistic allegiances within his own identity.

Why should we take the diversity of human cultures less seriously than the diversity of animal or plant species? Ought not our just desire to preserve our environment extend to the human environment itself? Our world would be a dreary place, both from the natural and from the cultural point of view, if the only surviving species were those we consider “useful,” together with a few we judge to be decorative or that have acquired symbolic value.

Hatte ich nicht hinter der Legende die Wahrheit gesucht? Als ich den Kern der Wahrheit erreicht zu haben glaubte, da war er Legende.

Virtue becomes unhealthy if it is not softened by some misdemeanors, and faith quickly becomes cruel if is not subdued by certain doubts.

You could read a dozen large tomes on the history of Islam from its very beginnings and you still wouldn’t understand what is going on in Algeria. But read 30 pages on colonialism and decolonisation and then you’ll understand quite a lot.

Our ancestors are our children; we peer through a hole in the wall and watch them play in their rooms, and they can’t see us.

The twentieth century will have taught us that no doctrine in itself is necessarily a liberating force: all of them may be perverted or take a wrong turning; all have blood on their hands – communism, liberalism, nationalism, each of the great religions, and even secularism. Nobody has a monopoly on humane values.

I no more believe in simplistic solutions than I do in simplistic identieties. The world is a complex machine that can’t be dismantled with a srewdriver. But that shouldn’t prevent us from observing, from trying to understand, from discussing, and sometimes suggesting a subject for reflection.