All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.

History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.

The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.

Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40% of the US population: 120 million people.

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.