Civilization is the sum total of all those activities that allow men to transcend mere biological existence and reach for a richer mental, aesthetic,… - Theodore Dalrymple

Education is not a shield against stupidity, much less against brutality. Indeed, one might almost define an intellectual as someone who can witness a massacre and see a principle.

It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it—in other words, by becoming civilized—that men become fully human.

When the Berlin Wall was dismantled I, like many other naive observers, supposed that the age of ideology was at an end. On the contrary, ideology proliferated, blossomed and balkanised; we underestimated people’s need, quasi-religious in nature, for an all-encompassing cause.