"People first concern themselves with meeting their basic needs; only afterwards, do they pursue any higher needs."

"As a result of the awareness and consciousness of decline, an awareness and consciousness of a national ethnicity or an Islamic identity also came into being."

"If a group of people feels that it has been humiliated and that its honour has been trampled underfoot, it will want to express its identity and this expression of an identity will take different shapes and forms."

"Establishing an equilibrium between the Islam of truth and Islam as an identity is one of the most difficult tasks of religious intellectuals."

"In order for answers to become clear, the questions have to be clear."

"We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality."

"In many of the things that people do, they themselves are the centre of attention, but they inscribe some other name on their banner."

"Energy is a concept that has been coined by physicists. There is no observable thing known as energy anywhere."

"We must break problems down into small, digestible bits. We must define the concepts that we use and explain what components they consist of. We must tackle small problems."