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.

Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.

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.

We have responsibilities for others, not just across space but across time. We have responsibilities to people who came before us. They left us a world of institutions, ideas or possibilities for which we, in turn, owe them something. One of the things we owe them is not to squander them.

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

If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants

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.