After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.

I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

There were various different keys in which European history had tended to be written. One is the lyrical key, the idea that somehow, in Bretton-Woods in 1945, a bunch of well-intentioned men got together and said, "This can't go on; let's build a European Union." And it just wasn't like that.

I worry that we have forgotten that the de-ideologized, de-politicized, uncontentious public space of the last 50 years as Europeans have experienced it is not the normal human condition. We shall be sorry to have abandoned a little too quickly the institutions that were set up by our parents and grandparents to protect themselves against a return of the bad old world. Because the bad old world can still come back to haunt you.

If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.

We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.