What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.

But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, You are also responsible for deciding what is your duty.

Come on. I don't have any problem violating my own insights in practice.

I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern, secular, nonreligious man, state bureaucracy is the only remaining contact with the dimension of the divine; the impenetrable omnipotence of bureaucracy harbors is divine enjoyment. It is the performance of its very purposelessness that generates an intense enjoyment, ready to reproduce itself forever.

In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being.

In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.

Probably never in human history did we live in a society in which, at the microlevel of personal behavior, our lives were so strongly regulated.