I think the imagination helps us move out of the purely oppositional mentality and see the world in a richer and more variegated way.

Life is about more than earning a living, and if you're not in the habit of thinking about it, you can end up middle-aged or even older and shocked to realize that your life seems empty.

I think the imagination helps us move out of the purely oppositional mentality and see the world in a richer and more variegated way.

A person in torment is not going to give you anything.

You have to pay so much to see theater, even in Chicago. In the Greek theater, you didn't have to pay anything. You actually had to go, and you just sat there all day.

There was a time, before I was in graduate school, when political philosophy pretty much ceased to exist. The positivists thought there were only two things you could do: conceptual analysis or empirical investigation. Any kind of political theory or even ethical theory was nonsense.

I am a very big fan of the nation, actually. In Cicero's time, there was this idea that although we were members of the whole world of human beings, we also needed to connect our imaginations to a smaller unit. The smaller unit was something we knew we could live or die for, as Cicero died for the Roman republic.