The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.

We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.

Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.

American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies.

The rottenness of politics in Yugoslavia didn't come as a surprise. The main lesson is that this is a war which could have easily been stopped by Europe. What was lacking was any will to do so. It's an irony of the achievement of Europe that it had lived for 40 years under the assumption of the unimaginability of internal wars, so it didn't know what to do with it when it was confronted with one close up.

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