This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

Jews and Gypsies were well-nigh the only Diasporas in 19th century Europe. Now go to London, it is a collection of Diasporas.

We already have plenty of fundamentalism and fundamental sects like for instance Rabbi Schneerson and Chabad Lubavitch. They feel more secure because they are in the warm, caring/sharing community. This is the difference between community (Gemeinschaft) and what Ferdinand Tönnies called Gesellschaft: a kind of setting in which you have no rights to do anything unless you pay for it, and no right to get anything unless you prove that you are 'credit worthy'. In a Gemeinschaft, however, you have a place at the table guaranteed whatever happens.

The carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar. I have always believed that you do not measure the health of a society by GNP but by the condition of its worst off.

I guess I am doomed to remain an outsider to the end, lacking as I am the indispensable qualities of an academic insider: school loyalty, conformity to the procedure, and readiness to obey by the school-endorsed criteria of cohesion and consistency.

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.

The planet is full and we will be rubbing shoulders forever. There is nowhere else to go.