America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.

Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep.

It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.

Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of peole who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand when in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A.J. Ayer.

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist.

People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.