Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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.
Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.
The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably – as it now appears to me – by those not exclusively dependent upon them.
American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies.
Reality is a powerful solvent.
I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can’t see a meaning in it at all.
There is nothing to be said for being crippled. You don’t see the world better or clearer, nor do you develop some special set of skills by way of compensation.
We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.
As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders.
If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.
History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.