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

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

I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself.

Reality is a powerful solvent.

The rottenness of politics in Yugoslavia didn't come as a surprise. The main lesson is that this is a war which could have easily been stopped by Europe. What was lacking was any will to do so. It's an irony of the achievement of Europe that it had lived for 40 years under the assumption of the unimaginability of internal wars, so it didn't know what to do with it when it was confronted with one close up.

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.

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.