My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't...
The term 'the American Left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why...
The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.
Um verdadeiro homem de fé deve acreditar que está aqui para um propósito e que é um objeto de real interesse para um Ser Supremo; deve também fingir ter pelo menos uma noção do que aquele Ser Supremo...
To all of us the thought of heaven is dear— Why not be sure of it and make it here? No doubt there is a heaven yonder too, But ’tis so far away—and you are near. Men talk of heaven,—there is no heav...
This surrender, by a man of the Enlightenment and a man of truly revolutionary and democratic temperament, is another reminder that history is a tragedy and not a morality tale
The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.
Of course what I'm about to share isn't true for me but...Friends, somebody said, are god's apology for relations. (p. 129)
Kingsley could ‘do’ the sound of a brass band approaching on a foggy day. He could become the Metropolitan line train entering Edgware Road station. He could be four wrecked tramps coughing in a bus s...
It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.
I can claim copyright only in myself, and occasionally in those who are either dead or have written about the same events, or who have a decent expectation of anonymity, or who are such appalling publ...
I am sometimes asked about the concept or definition of a 'public intellectual,' and though I find the whole idea faintly silly, I believe it should ideally mean that the person so identified is self-...
As the great Eugene Debs used to tell his socialist voters in the 1912 election campaign, he would not lead them into a Promised Land even if he could, because if they were trusting enough to be led i...
To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off
Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there's nothing to be afraid of, I won't know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I...
I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.
Of course, I do everything for money.
One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving th...