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

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.

We don't know what the future will bring, but that's because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit.

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.