1.
Secularism, doesn’t mean crushing religion, it just means creating a neutral space in which arguments between religious and secular people are settled by evidence, not dogma.

2.
One human rights truth, universally acknowledged, is that oil is an obstacle to democracy in every developing society. When a government can get what it needs out of oil derricks and ceases to derive its revenue from taxes, it loses any incentive to respond to the people.

-Michael Ignatieff