It is easy now to break the vows. It is even easier to part your ways if vows haven't been taken.

As long as being a stranger and surrounded by strangers was seen as a temporary irritant, a smallest departure from the binding rules of conduct by a member of a minority, was taken for a major crime justifying deportation.

The so called "progress," "time marching on," is not a straight line, but a pendulum.

I was leftwing, I am leftwing, and I will die leftwing.

The question of identity has separated from the issue of 'assimilation', having lost much of its drama and become, so to speak, a secular problem.

Civilisation, the orderly world in which we live, is frail. We are skating on thin ice. There is a fear of a collective disaster. Terrorism, genocide, flu, tsunamis.

With every death, a world is disappearing.