“How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?”
Author detail
English-American historian
Quotes
Showing 1-16 of 16
“How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?”
“I believe that if we think back to the period from F.D.R. through, let us say, Bush I, until the end of the Cold War, we lived through an artificial period in which American interests and Eu...”
“We need to learn... how war brutalises and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and dem...”
“I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.”
“Popularizing - much less venturing beyond one's secure turf - was frowned upon for many years. I think I probably internalized the prohibition, even though I was - and knew I was - among the...”
“I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself.”
“I started work on my first French history book in 1969; on 'Socialism in Provence' in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic public...”
“It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.”
“It would be suicide in the American academy to show too early an interest beyond your doctoral specialization: charges of everything from charlatanry to ambition would be levied and tenure d...”
“Social democrats are characteristically modest - a political quality whose virtues are overestimated. We need to apologise a little less for our shortcomings and speak more assertively of ac...”
“The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.”
“I don't want to be the passively alert vegetable in the corner that takes in everything but can't communicate, which I think would suck a lot of life out of my family without giving very muc...”
“Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.”
“Reality is a powerful solvent.”
“We have responsibilities for others, not just across space but across time. We have responsibilities to people who came before us. They left us a world of institutions, ideas or possibilitie...”
“No one wants to live in a wheelchair unable to talk, only winking once for yes and twice for no. It's perfectly reasonable that there will come a point where the balance of judgment of life...”