So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don’t understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.
There can be no understanding without that sympathy which puts us, through the imagination, and (another’s) situation.
The bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier-explorer.
After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism
The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril
I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.
The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau’s social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a “partnership” between the present generation and future generations.
Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous.
The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.
No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
Who killed Christianity in Europe? Was it, as (Max) Weber himself predicted, that the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy the Protestant ethic parents, as materialism corrupted the original aestheticism of the godly?
Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.
As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I’m the least authoritarian professor you’ll ever meet.
Something that’s seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I’m on the side of the bourgeoisie.
The debate that I’m interested in having is with seriously smart people about how we design institutions in the 21st century that will genuinely address problems of poverty and educational underachievement.
There aren’t many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom.