Human attention tends to be focused on the satisfactions relationships are hoped to bring, precisely because somehow they have not been truly satisfactory. And if they do satisfy, the price of this satisfaction has often been found to be unacceptable.

There is less pressure on abandoning native communities: what for? There is nothing to be gained by it. On one hand, there are plenty tempting opportunities of experimenting with identities - being one kind of person today and a different the next day. On the other hand, there is little pressure to include the ethnic identity or religious identity into this mechanism, because now everybody is in a kind of Diaspora today.

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

A reliable assurance of the right and ability to dismantle the constructed structure must be offered, before the job of construction starts in earnest.

The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.

We are living at the moment in revolutionary times. Argentineans probably are more aware of it than anybody else, because they tasted it several years earlier - but now the whole world is in trouble.

All the skills which I have acquired during my sociological life allow me to diagnose and explain what is going on, but not to predict what will happen.