Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Reality is a powerful solvent.
Israel today is bad for the Jews.
But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.
We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when.
Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.
I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.
You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps.
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
When you are in my classroom, you get everything from me. But you bloody well better give everything too.
I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.
Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
I do think we're on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don't know how to talk about it.
I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.
Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.
If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?
The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.
I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself.
After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.
At a certain point, to remain slightly tangential to wherever I was became a way of 'being Tony': by not being anything that everyone else was.
All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.
As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge.
I think if I'm controversial it's not because I set out to be. It's because I've never felt comfortable being part of someone else's mainstream community.
There is nothing to be said for being crippled. You don't see the world better or clearer, nor do you develop some special set of skills by way of compensation.
Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.
For Europe to play a part in the world on the scale of its wealth and its population and its capacities, Europe has to be united in some way, and Europe is not united.
I think Bush was seen as someone who was disentangling America from the connections that it had with the outside world, that it found encumbering for domestic purposes.
Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?
I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.
Obviously a primary liberal conviction is that we should be tolerant of other peoples' convictions. But if we believe in something, we had better find ways to say so convincingly.
Healthcare reform is a paradigmatic case. It is self-evidently necessary and inevitable and has been on the agenda for 35 years, and the political class seems completely unable to respond to it.
If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.
I went to live on a kibbutz, and I'd idealized the world of collective, agrarian work, where everyone was equal, everyone contributed, that all this awful European intellectual stuff just fell away.
I don't want to be the passively alert vegetable in the corner that takes in everything but can't communicate, which I think would suck a lot of life out of my family without giving very much to me.