Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
Americans use the word ‘dream’ as often as psychoanalysts do.
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.
Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.
All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.
The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.
If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.
If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.
Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
Nothing in human life is inherently private.
It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.
The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics – I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it’s more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.