Hope is a feeling that life and work have meaning. You either have it or you don't, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you.

Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name -- the only politics I am willing to devote myself to -- is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole.

If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all.

There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them.

All human suffering concerns each human being.

It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.

It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to that automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they too are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in post-totalitarian societies.