What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

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

I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.

What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge.

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