In Montreal, where I taught in 1970, I met many people. The only ones who said to me they were Canadians, were Jews. All the rest were Scotts, Irish, English, French, Swedes.

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

If there is something to permit the distinction between "solid" and "liquid" phases of modernity (that is, arranging them in an order of succession), it is the change in both the manifest and latent purpose behind the effort.

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.

For one to be free there must be at least two.

In the last thirty years we have gained enormous amount of freedom (everywhere, except perhaps in places like Burma or North Korea), but we lost quite a large amount of security. Because of all sorts of reasons, because of globalization which stripped the nation state of a large part of its sovereignty away, because of the dismantling of the so-called welfare state. As a result, people feel simultaneously much freer and much more insecure.

Freedom is the slogan of the strong, who feel self confident, self sufficient to do it alone.