Sex is... perfectly natural. It's something that's pleasurable. It's enjoyable and it enhances a relationship. So why don't we learn as much as we can about it and become comfortable with ourselves as sexual human beings because we are all sexual?

Mine is just a simple old human story - of one person trying with great rigor and discipline to comprehend her personal relationship with divinity.

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then only a few feet away in the cookbook section just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?

Individual psychotherapy - that is engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship - requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist must be patient modest and a perceptive listener rather than a talker and advice-giver.

I have absolutely no empathy for camels. I didn't care for being abused in the Middle East by those horrible horrible horrible creatures. They don't like people. It's not at all like the relationship between horses and humans.

In human relationships kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

The attacks of September 11 - and subsequent acts of terror from London to Madrid to Fort Hood Texas - embody the most repulsive of human instincts the will to power at the price of the lives of others.

The world is not going into concentric blocs of power. It is actually going into a diffusion of power with more centres of decision-making than ever in human civilisation. That requires you to place yourself in far more hubs of power than ever before.

Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president from a murderous general or a beloved leader I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.