Socrates was likewise right that pissing people off is how we first, and maybe best, go about the business of provoking 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.

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

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.

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

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.