If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have

I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when.

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

We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The 60s were a continuation of the 50s much more than people realized. Certainly in some countries, like Britain, there was still a culture of deference, whereas in the 70s we really are in a time of angry transition. The generation that came into young adulthood in the 70s couldn't find jobs; that wasn't true in my generation. They entered a time when two depressing things hit them both at the same time.

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.

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