If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.

The idea of power as a possession, whose asset can be banked and drawn on when needed, comes easy to a society whose rules grow out of the methods of finance capitalism.

power is not a thing to be owned. But if you believe that it is such a thing, losing it becomes a possibility to fear. That fear, I think, is one reason for the dark projections of a catastrophic future that are so widespread, in our dual society. The present powerful, being committed to polarization, expect that any new deal will overturn the one that set them in authority; that the last shall be first and the first last, role reversal everywhere, men as slaves, women as masters, in a revolution of contradiction.

Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

We don't get offered crises, they arrive.

Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?

it is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made available.