I got a text from my husband. "Manal, you are divorced," it read. "Your papers are in the court of Khobar." I was divorced in my absence, just as I had been married.

The trouble with all these far-right and far-left mentalities is that they can encompass only one side of an argument and are congenitally incapable of holding two opinions in their heads at the same time.

In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers' broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.

Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the

Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.

Fear does not incline people to be moderate in their use of extreme tactics.

What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he's certain he'll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.]

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

The dangerous enemies of your species are fundamentalism, intolerance, separatism, extremism, hostility and prejudicial fear, be it religious, atheistic or political.

The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation; extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.