There are other ways of finding satisfaction, recipes for human happiness, enjoyment, dignified and meaningful, gratifying life, than increased consumption that increases production.

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

Jews are no longer pressed and obliged to fight, hide or deny their Jewishness. What for? No one actually requires today to abandon the idiosyncrasy of some other culture or ethnic tradition. The great achievement of this last period is that we have been slowly, sometimes reluctantly, yet steadily, learning the art of living with differences.

People do not choose a government that will bring the market within their control; instead, the market in every way conditions governments to bring the people within its control.

As to describing me as an outsider throughout, and an outsider through and through - I have no reason to disagree.

In "solid modernity" difference was tolerated as a temporary irritant only, expected to disappear tomorrow, when "those aliens" will become like us. "Living with strangers" was therefore not something to last and did not call for developing appropriate arts and skills. Now, however, it looks like that diasporic context of our living will not go away - it will be there forever, so learning how to live with strangers day in, day out without abandoning my own strangeness is high on the agenda.

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.