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

The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.

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.

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

Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.

Reality is a powerful solvent.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.