Never before, I suspect, have so many people been so rich to so little purpose.

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.

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.

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.

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

Never before, I suspect, have so many people been so rich to so little purpose.