I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.

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.

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.

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.

We have responsibilities for others, not just across space but across time. We have responsibilities to people who came before us. They left us a world of institutions, ideas or possibilities for which we, in turn, owe them something. One of the things we owe them is not to squander them.

The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.

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