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.

Our desires are never wholly transparent, even to ourselves.

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.

Tyranny is abhorrent, freedom benefits all, whereas violence benefits no one for long.

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.

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

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