We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.

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

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have

Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies.... The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves - thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.

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.

I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.