We need to start talking about inequality again; we need to start talking about the inequities and unfairnesses and the injustices of an excessively divided society, divided by wealth, by opportunity, by outcome, by assets and so forth.

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".

At a certain point, to remain slightly tangential to wherever I was became a way of 'being Tony': by not being anything that everyone else was.

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

Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.

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

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.