If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.
Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
But I’m English. We don’t do uplifting.
I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.
I do think we’re on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don’t know how to talk about it.
I don’t much mind being expelled from communities.
I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don’t believe it myself.
After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants.
If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.
What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.
The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.
We need to start talking about inequality again; we need to start talking about the inequities and unfairnesses and the injustices of an excessively divided society, divided by wealth, by opportunity, by outcome, by assets and so forth.
Love, it seems to me, is the condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?
We have responsibilities for others, not just across space but across time. We have responsibilities to people who came before us. They left us a world of institutions, ideas or possibilities for which we, in turn, owe them something. One of the things we owe them is not to squander them.
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.