It's important to remember that World War II was experienced very much as a continuity in that sense. Most of World War II in most of Europe wasn't a war; it was an occupation. The war was at the beginning and the end, except in Germany and the Soviet Union, and even there really only at the end. So the rest of time it's an occupation, which in some ways was experienced as an extension of the interwar period. World War II was simply an extreme form, in a whole new key, of the disruption of normal life that began in 1914.

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

If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.

I don't much mind being expelled from communities.

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.

I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.

Israel today is bad for the Jews.