Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.

God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.

A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life.

I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith

If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.