Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.

Can one consider controversy without falling into it?

If there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, there is nothing more ubiquitously pervasive than an idea whose time won't go.

Art is a framework, a kind of living trellis, on which public dreaming can shape itself.

Mistrust must be acted on, and effective action by the ruled is not solitary and singular, but joint and repeated.

We don't get offered crises, they arrive.

The common impulse is not to sustain a marriage by finding satisfaction elsewhere, but to end the marriage and set up a new one which will provide the comfort lacking in the first.