Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

When we criticize in Iran the actions of the government the fundamentalists say that we and the Bush Administration are in the same camp. The funny thing is that human rights activists and Mr. Bush can never be situated in the same group.

One can always come up with funny lists and jokes. You know what? I take it back. Not everyone can always come up with funny lists and some jokes. I'm very lucky to have a gift where I can do that pretty ably.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

Men can absent themselves from real life for their art more easily. Women are anchored into the quotidian business of getting food on the table making sure everybody's socks match the soccer gear is ready. I admire idealists but they're usually enabled by someone who holds the tether on their balloon who pays the bills and sweeps up after them.

Everything is just better in California - the wine the food fruits and vegetables the comforts of living. Even the instrumentalists are generous and curious. Everything is wonderful.

I think people are smart enough to sort it out. They know when they're watching one of these food fight shows where journalists sit around and yell and scream at each other versus serious issue reporting.

Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

I fear that in the end the famous debate among materialists idealists and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask if we cannot trust the Bible what can we trust?

There is a split between Muslims who want to practice their faith in peace and tolerance with other religions and other people and these extreme radical fundamentalists who have shown a total lack of tolerance for people with different views starting with people who they don't think are good Muslims and going on to include Christians and Jews.

For more than 200 years materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

Bad religion is arrogant self-righteous dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.

There are a lot of Christian fundamentalists there are a lot of Muslim extremists. Every religion - Mormonism - has something way on the side that's completely using the religion as some weird backbone for their twisted faith. It has nothing to do with their religion.

By concentrating on what is good in people by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice and by asking them to put their faith in the future socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.

At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.

I can't say I'm not grateful to have journalists writing about me as a genius. But I know it's not true. I'm not confused. I understand that success comes through a lot of failure and a lot of very embarrassing failure. People want to create the next Facebook but they are too afraid to create the next Facemash.

In the revolt against idealism the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

And think of how we challenged the idea of a male dominated Parliament with All-Women shortlists and made the cause of gender equality central to our government. We were right to do so.

Mankind is considered (by the radical environmentalists) the lowest and the meanest of all species and is blamed for everything.

Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public and the new is always alarming.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description as science writers but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers you see but we're also realists of a sort.

Sometimes the only realists are the dreamers.