Mark Kingwell Quotes

Paradoxically, the problems of politics often arise not in the form of a problem of scarcity, but as one of abundance.

It wasn't atheism and corruption they feared, but inquiry.

Politics is rather the creation of the best possible polity out of the deep inner needs of its citizenry - who are only some of its members.

For every apparent gain, in short, we now observe a balancing danger. This is the world we have created.

We are capitalism made flesh.

War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others.

Tyranny is abhorrent, freedom benefits all, whereas violence benefits no one for long.

Dreams are evidence that we are creatures who produce more meaning than we can ourselves understand.

Never before, I suspect, have so many people been so rich to so little purpose.

I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.

We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging.

Socrates was likewise right that pissing people off is how we first, and maybe best, go about the business of provoking thought.

Friendship requires a leap, not of faith but of regard.

Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought.

All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices.