If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.

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

I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.

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

The rottenness of politics in Yugoslavia didn't come as a surprise. The main lesson is that this is a war which could have easily been stopped by Europe. What was lacking was any will to do so. It's an irony of the achievement of Europe that it had lived for 40 years under the assumption of the unimaginability of internal wars, so it didn't know what to do with it when it was confronted with one close up.

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