“The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.”

“Even bold and revolutionary thinkers bow to the judgment of science. Kropotkin wants to break up all existing institutions, but he does not touch science. Ibsen goes very far in his critique of bourgeois society, but he retains science as a measure of truth. Levi Strauss has made us realize that Western thought is not the lonely peak of human achievement it was once thought to be, but he and his followers exclude science from their relativization of ideologies. Marx and Engels were convinced that science would aid the workers in their quest for mental and social liberation.”

“It should now be clear that ideology – the ideological level – is an organic part of every society. Human societies need these systems of ideas and beliefs in order to survive, and they secrete ideology as if it were an essential nourishment for their being and for their historical continuance.”

“When people look most vicious, what you are seeing is not their animal side. It is the savagery that only humans can muster.”

“We have no shot at creating a thriving human society without seeing the truth. And we can’t create a thriving human society without making this a society that is conducive to people being truthful.”

“By the structure of society, I mean the institutional and ideological presuppositions that shape the routine practices, conflicts, and transactions in that society, and that are largely taken for granted, even to the point of being invisible, as if they were part of the nature of things. In a free society, this institutional and ideological framework does not present itself as an alien fate beyond the reach of the transformative will and imagination.”

“The desire to continue to feel yourself guilty arguably finds its endpoint in modern European liberal societies: the first societies in human history who, when they are hit, ask what they did to deserve it. Unassuageable historical guilt carries over into the present.”

“Cultural change is the statistical product of the separate behavioral responses of large numbers of human beings who cope as best they can with social existence.”

“There is not a single verse in the Qur’an calling for the unity or liberation specifically of the Arab nation. In fact the Qur’anic concept of Ummah i.e. nation is ideologically against any manifestations of nationalist tendencies. The Qur’an recommends unity of the whole human kind on the criteria of truth.”

“No human being can be more human than another human being. I liberate you from my ignorance.”