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.

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

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

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

We don't know what the future will bring, but that's because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit.

War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others.

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.