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

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.

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.

Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.

I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

Although the United States lost a quarter of a million men and women, civilians and soldiers, in World War II, that's considerably less than the Russians lost in soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. It's important to convey to countries and to people and to generations who have no experience of the 20th century as it was lived in Europe just how catastrophic it was.

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