I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!

Rosa Luxemburg was - still is for me - a great personal and intellectual heroine. Her analysis of Leninism and capitalism and social democracy are all worth reading. I wouldn't consider anyone truly politically literate if they hadn't given her work at least some study.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.

Exceptional claims, require exceptional evidence.