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

We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.

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

The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.

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.

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

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