How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?

There is nothing to be said for being crippled. You don't see the world better or clearer, nor do you develop some special set of skills by way of compensation.

It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head.

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

I do think we're on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don't know how to talk about it.

Although the United States lost a quarter of a million men and women, civilians and soldiers, in World War II, that's considerably less than the Russians lost in soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. It's important to convey to countries and to people and to generations who have no experience of the 20th century as it was lived in Europe just how catastrophic it was.

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.