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

For every apparent gain, in short, we now observe a balancing danger. This is the world we have created.

Neiman's book is written with considerable flair, as many critics have already noted, but it possesses a far rarer and more valuable quality: moral seriousness. Her argument builds a powerful emotional force, a sense of deep inevitability. . . . It is not often that a work of such dark conclusions has felt so hopeful and brave.

Paradoxically, the problems of politics often arise not in the form of a problem of scarcity, but as one of abundance.

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.

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.

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