We live in a globalising world. That means that all of us, consciously or not, depend on each other. Whatever we do or refrain from doing affects the lives of people who live in places we'll never visit.

Our bad luck is that our writing is linear, while we think circularly.

The art of walking on quicksand is still beyond me. What I learned is only how difficult this art is to master and how hard people need to struggle to learn it.

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.

Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.

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.

If only evil things are done by evil people... Life would be then safe, morally elevated, cozy - we know how to spot evil people and what to do with them to pay for their crimes.