Mark Kingwell Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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