Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.

If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.

The conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect. It seems too pat and predictable, too clearly a matter of politics rather than faith.

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.