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

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.

The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.

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

Yugoslavia served as a reminder that the lessons of World War Two were only partially learned. There's a great line someone wrote in the middle of the 1990s, at the time when Clinton was agonizing about whether or not to go into Bosnia: "Everyone says, 'Never again. Never again.' But all they really mean is never again will Germans kill Jews in the streets of Warsaw".

Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.

I don't much mind being expelled from communities.