"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

"A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep."

"The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame."

"The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas—uncertainty, progress, change—into crimes."

"The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a new Dark Age, when knowledge will be replaced by dogma, and the light of reason extinguished."