The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.

We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom.

What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?

I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist. For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good!

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

I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.

Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.