There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.

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.

The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.

Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

The world is not divided into two types of being, one superior and the other merely surrounding it. Being, nature, the universe - they are all one infinitely complex and mysterious metaorganism of which we are but a part, though a unique one.