We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging.

Politics is rather the creation of the best possible polity out of the deep inner needs of its citizenry - who are only some of its members.

All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices.

Ambition is ever tempered by experience. Otherwise, fortune makes fools of us all.

Socrates was likewise right that pissing people off is how we first, and maybe best, go about the business of provoking thought.

Friendship requires a leap, not of faith but of regard.

Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought.