Everybody is in trouble, including the up-and-coming economic miracles of China, Brazil or India.

After many years of thinking, reading and writing and looking, I came to believe that there are two basic, essential values which are indispensable for humane, decent, dignified life: one is freedom, and the other is security.

You are a stranger, I am a stranger, we all remain strangers, and nevertheless we can like or even love each other.

I worry about younger generations who were born to view their country trampling on humanity of everyone that comes in its way, as the 'normal state of affairs" - because they knew no other. We know how easy it is to shed, under such circumstances, the thin and frail veneer of civilization, not to mention the moral standards of which the Jews were presumed to be the world's teachers.

Middle class people, the bourgeoisie, they are also feeling frightened at the moment. Some fear losing their fortunes; some go bankrupt; some are thinking about suicide. They don't know if they will retain the beautiful house that they bought, or what will happen to the five family cars.

What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.

Ingeniously, capitalism discovered that the economy may be moved not by satisfying existing needs, but by creating new ones.