The different American experience of the 20th Century is crucial because the lesson of the century for Europe, which essentially is that the human condition is tragic, led it to have a build a welfare system and a set of laws and social arrangements that are more prophylactic than idealistic. It's not about building perfect futures; it's about preventing terrible pasts. I think that is something that Europeans in the second half of the 20th century knew in their bones and Americans never did, and it's one of the big differences between the two Western cultures.

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

Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.

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

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?

Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.

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