I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.

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.

How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us?

Dreams are evidence that we are creatures who produce more meaning than we can ourselves understand.

Our desires are never wholly transparent, even to ourselves.

I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.

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.