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.

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

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.

Reality is a powerful solvent.

History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.

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.