University Of Oxford Alumni

"The Jewish sense of time was...unilinear rather than cyclical. Even the repeated lapses of Israel into idolatry did not dispel belief in God’s overall control and direction of events."

"As swift to scent the sophist as to praise The honest worker or the well turned phrase."

"Only the pride of the intellect could suppose that the human will can be completely self-determining. The incarnation revealed that something more is needed. ‘My mind, questioning itself upon its own powers, feels that it cannot rightly trust its own report.’ Augustine’s conception of the self became a subtle mixture of autonomy and dependence."

"Christianity changed the ground of human identity. It was able to do that because of the way it combined Jewish monotheism with an abstract universalism that had roots in later Greek philosophy. By emphasizing the moral equality of humans, quite apart from any social roles they might occupy, Christianity changed ‘the name of the game’. Social rules became secondary. They followed and, in a crucial sense, had to be understood as subordinate to a God-given human identity, something all humans share equally. Thus, humans were to live in ‘two cities’ at the same time."

"In the twelfth century, reason began to lose the ontologically privileged position it had been accorded by an aristocratic society. Its propositions were open, at least in principle, to equal scrutiny, grounded in a shared faith. (Did not St Bernard complain that under Abelard’s influence matters of the faith were being discussed at the crossroads?) The role of reason was being democratized. Reason ceased to be something that used people, and became something people used."

"What is the crux of secularism? It is that belief in an underlying or moral equality of humans implies that there is a sphere in which each should be free to make his or her own decisions, a sphere of conscience and free action. That belief is summarized in the central value of classical liberalism: the commitment to ‘equal liberty’. Is this indifference or non-belief? Not at all. It rests on the firm belief that to be human means being a rational and moral agent, a free chooser with responsibility for one’s actions. It puts a premium on conscience rather than the ‘blind’ following of rules. It joins rights with duties to others.This is also the central egalitarian moral insight of Christianity. It stands out from St Paul’s contrast between ‘Christian liberty’ and observance of the Jewish law. Enforced belief was, for Paul and many early Christians, a contradiction in terms. Strikingly, in its first centuries Christianity spread by persuasion, not by force of arms — a contrast to the early spread of Islam."

"With the age-old goal of universal prosperity within sight, we must question whether the methods—technological values and virtues, the instrumental goals of our affluent society—that help us approach this goal will serve to take us beyond it."

"No civilization prior to the European had occasion to believe in the systematic material progress of the whole human race; no civilization placed such stress upon the quantity rather than the quality of life; no civilization drove itself so relentlessly to an ever-receding goal; no civilization was so passion-charged to replace what is with what could be; no civilization had striven as the West has done to direct the world according to its will; no civilization has known so few moments of peace and tranquility."

"Paul and Augustine transformed Jewish belief in a divine will directed at a ‘chosen’ people. They universalized the claims of that will and internalized it, making it available to all of humanity. In doing so, they created the potential for ‘Christian liberty’, a rightful power for individuals. By combining the assumption of human equality with the need to discover the divine will, a new relationship with deity became possible, one that was personal rather than tribal. Yet if Paul and Augustine conjured up a vision of moral freedom, it was the twelfth-century canonists who converted that vision into a formal legal system founded on natural rights."

"Liberalism, the dominant ideology of our time, has been dangerously distorted by the impact of economism. It is that impact which has knocked the citizen off his pedestal and replaced him with the consumer."

"If we want to understand the distinctive constitution of Europe, we must go back to its religious foundations. For the moral beliefs which Christianity fostered still underpin civil society in Europe, the institutions that surround us."

"The failure of utilitarianism to address a will in which it does not altogether believe stands in sharp contrast to the mainstream of liberal thought represented by the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. For Kant, liberalism was first and last about the will....Like Christianity, Kantian liberalism identifies the greatest need of humans, as self-conscious beings, as the need for a rule of conduct, the means of governing oneself as a free and responsible agent.Modern economism's failure is that it does not face up to this question of self-government or address the issue of what is required to make the empire of the will legitimate. For the utilitarian maxim that pleasure or happiness should be maximized fails to acknowledge the need to govern the empire of the will. It provides instead an aggregative criterion for public decision-making, a criterion which is defective because it does not provide for the claims of justice. But that failure over justice reflects, in turn, utilitarianism's failure to distinguish between persons as separate and autonomous agents, as rational agents who need a rule by which to regulate their own wills. Utilitarianism merely aggregates satisfactions, looking upon society as a kind of collective self."

"Perhaps it is symbolic that Brook Farm, initially the most American of our Utopian communities, perished in a holocaust and was never fully rebuilt. A parallel destiny has pursued not only the other attempts to implement Utopian vision in this country, but the Utopian spirit in American life as a whole. As thinkers, Americans rarely if ever now attempt to construct an imaginary society better than that in which they live; and at the same time, the faith that our society is in some sense a Utopia has surely disappeared....But if we define Utopia as any attempt to make imaginatively concrete the possibilities of the future, Utopias have not in our own day ceased to exist, but have merely been transvalued....Our visions of the future have shifted from images of hope to vistas of despair; Utopias have become warnings, not beacons. Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy, and ironically even Skinner's Walden Two—the vast majority of our serious visions of the future are negative visions, extensions of the most pernicious trends of the present."

"My father's evangelicalism was deepened and darkened by his bereavement. He seemed to lose interest in everything except religion, and under the influence of some Plymouth Brethren...his religion degenerated into bigotry. He never joined the sect, but he read their literature, shared many of their opinions and grew into their narrow intolerance."

"The literary world does quite like the notion of genius, but it has no place for a Picasso."

"As it turns out, the is not remotely about Tom Cruise fighting alongside 19th-century Samurai in Japan. Rather, it follows the story of a woman named Sibylla raising her brilliant young son Ludo in in 1990s London. Unable to afford heat for their home, the two spend their days riding the . While the story is nominally centered around Ludo’s efforts to find his father, it is really about the pain and pleasure of integrating a unique mind into a world that values different things. Sibylla and Ludo both have excruciatingly high standards, the genius needed to attain them, and a near-total inability to tolerate compromise. Because most people’s lives are a series of compromises made bearable by self-delusion, Sibylla and Ludo are isolated, cut off from the outside world and outside relationships. The particular joy of the book, I think, is that the characters are so intensely and specifically themselves that it is impossible to imagine them working in a more conventional novel. But I believed in them completely — a testament to the strength of DeWitt’s writing."

"DeWitt has an insatiable mind and deep pockets of knowledge in disparate subjects; she went on tangents about strategies, the quirks of and her obsession with the , who inspired one of her many unfinished novels. She speaks French and German, can read Greek and Latin, and understands close to a dozen other languages with varying degrees of proficiency — among them Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese."

"I thought if I could talk to editors, if I could talk to s, if I could show them the kinds of things you could do if you were making use of the page rather than just using words, then people would understand there has to be a way of approaching a book more like a film. With film, yes, you start out with a , but the director is given resources with which to realize that film. And everybody understands you can’t know from the beginning what that film is going to be in the end. You are not expected to submit an already completed film in order to get funding. But that is the way publishing works. It’s constrained by a specific restricted idea of what text is, which is this: text is word. You hand in your text, and then it’s handed over to the designer, but you have no contact with that person. The is theirs, the s are theirs; they just do whatever they want, and you have no discussion with them about how the presentation actually relates to what the text is about."

"... was taught at the age of three. ... he had an extremely challenging early education. What would happen if you had a single mother who tried out the ? ... What if the mother would use ' to provide s for her fatherless boy?"

"I have dwelt thus at length on Hamlet's melancholy because, from the psychological point of view, it is the centre of the tragedy, and to omit it from consideration or to underrate its intensity is to make Shakespeare's story unintelligible. But the psychological point of view is not equivalent to the tragic; and, having once given its due weight to the fact of Hamlet's melancholy, we may freely admit, or rather may be anxious to insist, that this pathological condition would excite but little, if any, tragic interest if it were not the condition of a nature distinguished by that speculative genius on which the Schlegel–Coleridge type of theory lays stress. Such theories misinterpret the connection between that genius and Hamlet's failure, but still it is this connection which gives to his story its peculiar fascination and makes it appear (if the phrase may be allowed) as the symbol of a tragic mystery inherent in human nature. Wherever this mystery touches us, wherever we are forced to feel the wonder and awe of man's godlike 'apprehension' and his 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' and at the same time are forced to see him powerless in his petty sphere of action, and powerless (it would appear) from the very divinity of his thought, we remember Hamlet. And this is the reason why, in the great ideal movement which began towards the close of the eighteenth century, this tragedy acquired a position unique among Shakespeare's dramas, and shared only by Goethe's Faust. It was not that Hamlet is Shakespeare's greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that Hamlet most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul's infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring."

"Most English people have heard the name of the Mughals. They have believed that the Mughal Empire was the predecessor to British rule in India. Therefore, they are surprised to learn that in the initial phase of British conquest, the English conquerors did not engage in conflict with any Mughal, whereas their struggle with the Marathas continued incessantly. Many people must be curious about who these Marathas were, who really destroyed the Mughal Empire, who fought with the English and the French to gain control over India, who once again revolted in 1857 and clashed arms with the British rule, and among whom emerged revolutionary leaders as politically astute as Nana Sahib and as brave as the Rani of Jhansi."

"It is a spirit. It comes we know not whence. It will not speak at our bidding, nor answer in our language. It is not our servant; it is our master."

"I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost Sat for a civil service post. The English paper for that year Had several questions on King Lear, Which Shakespeare answered very badly Because he hadn’t read his Bradley."

"The curate thinks you have no soul; I know that he has none."

"But in some canine Paradise Your wraith, I know, rebukes the moon,And quarters every plain and hill, Seeking its master... As for me This prayer at least the gods fulfill; That when I pass the flood and seeOld Charon by the Stygian coast Take toll of all the shades who land, Your little, faithful barking ghost May leap to lick my phantom hand."

"My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans — their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer. During treatment, I learned that one of my chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, owes its existence to an ocean animal: a sponge that lives in the Caribbean Sea, Tectitethya crypta. This discovery was made by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who first synthesized the drug in 1959, and who almost certainly relied on government funding, the very thing that Bobby has already cut. I won't write about cytarabine. I won’t find out if we were able to harness the power of the oceans, or if we let them boil and turn into a garbage dump. My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet. Since I've been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person."

"Bobby has said, "There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective." Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom."

"I let the memories come and go. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I'm watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I'll remember this forever, I'll remember this when I'm dead. Obviously, I won't. But since I don't know what death is like and there's no one to tell me what comes after it, I'll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember."

"I know that not everyone can be married to a doctor, but, if you can, it’s a very good idea. He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don't get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find. My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half. They have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it. This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day. For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family's life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it."

"I ended up spending five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian, and the strangeness and sadness of what I was being told about myself made me hunt for the humor in it. I didn't know what else to do. I decided that everyone in the hospital had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and I was their target. It was a joke that I found funnier than everyone else did. Later, when I was bald and had a scrape on my face from a fall, my joke was that I was a busted-up Voldemort."

"During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe. My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me. My son might have a few memories, but he'll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I didn't ever really get to take care of my daughter — I couldn't change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don't know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother."

"I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River — eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I work as an environmental journalist, and for one article I skied the Birkebeiner, a fifty-kilometre cross-country race in Wisconsin, which took me seven and a half hours. I loved to have people over for dinner and to make cakes for my friends’ birthdays. I went to museums and plays and got to jump in a cranberry bog for my job. I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life."

"I don't buy a lot of bags or shoes, but it's easier to cut beef out of your diet than to not get the new pair of sneakers you need."

"When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes — people and places and stray conversations — and refuse to stop."

"I want people to feel they can do things. They may not be easy things, but the possibility of change exists."

"The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. It was mostly seen in older patients. Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders. I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later. I am not elderly — I had just turned thirty-four."

"I also think the scale of the change is only going to be solved by governmental action and corporate responsibility, which often will come from governmental regulation. Which is why it's so important to be able to vote and understand these issues."

"Meanwhile, during the CAR-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family. In August, 2024, he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, who said that he was going to "let Bobby go wild" on health. My mother wrote a letter to the Senate, to try and stop his confirmation; my brother had been speaking out against his lies for months. I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government. Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs. (Columbia was one of the Trump Administration’s first targets in its crusade against alleged antisemitism on campuses; in May, the university laid off a hundred and eighty researchers after federal-funding cuts.)"

"Miles of cornfields, and ballet in the evening."

"For the tradition of authority is naturally a Tory tradition, and, but for the influence of Conservative prudence and justice, the successors of the Tories might probably have been ready to use the authority of the State with a freedom which we associate with Socialism."

"Historically the principle was adopted that every one must be saved from death by starvation or exposure, but that on the other hand no one ought to be supported by the State in idleness. This was the policy of Elizabeth's famous Act establishing the Poor Law. Nor is it unfair to claim the Poor Law as at any rate of Tory extraction. It was imposed by religious sentiment, and it was the solution of a difficulty caused by an attack on the Church. It arose out of the suffering which had been occasioned by the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, and by the consequent cessation of the relief of the poor which the monasteries had been wont to give. Under the Poor Law the State took over the work that had formerly been performed by the alms of the Church; and in so doing the State acted under the moral ascendency of Church teaching."

"The value of human character, the sacredness of justice on the one side, reverence for authority and tenderness towards human suffering upon the other, make the religious standpoint at once the safest and the most practical for the task of social reform. Toryism even within itself contains balanced principles which make for safety, and when united with the prudence of the natural conservative it forms the most efficient and the most secure political guide for a social reformer."

"For the rest, he continued to be a brilliant figure in the social life of his time; his presence welcome, his conversation witty, his views original, his candour entertaining, his power of exposition remarkable, his charm unaffected. No sketch can hope to give the peculiar flavour of his personality, nor is it easy to disinter even from the vast chambers of the dead a parallel for him. Yet a Plutarch, in search of his compeer, might find in Montalembert—the Montalembert of Sainte-Beuve's portrait—enough points of resemblance to justify a comparison between two ardent devotees of liberty, and, according to their respective interpretations, of Catholicism."

"Two men had a conspicuous influence in creating and leading the Conservative movement: one was Pitt and the other was Burke. Pitt was the practical leader who headed the opposition to the French Revolution and behind whom the Toryism of George III, the natural conservatism of Burke, the zeal for the imperial greatness of the country, of which he himself was the best exponent, coalesced together and found their sphere of activity in resisting revolutionary France as the enemy of Church and King, the destroyer of all that was ordered and settled, the formidable enemy of the greatness and even the safety of England. And in Burke Conservatism found its first and perhaps its greatest teacher, who poured forth with extraordinary rhetorical power the language of an anti-revolutionary faith, and gave to the Conservative movement the dignity of a philosophical creed and the fervour of a religious crusade."

"Defeat goes deeper into the human soul than victory. To be in someone else’s power is a conscious experience which induces doubts about the ordering of the universe, while those who have power can forget it, or can assume that it is part of the natural order of things and invent or adopt ideas which justify their possession of it."

"The essential characteristic of a Tory is that in controversies relating to Church and King he takes the royal and ecclesiastical side."

"Probably no function of Conservatism is more important at the present time than to watch over the religious life of the people in the sphere of politics. Religion, as has been pointed out, touches politics very closely in respect to many questions—such as the claims of rich and poor, all measures for ameliorating the condition of the people, the connection between Church and State, and national education. Its indirect influence extends beyond these limits as far as any controversy which raises issues of moral obligation. The championship of religion is therefore the most important of the functions of Conservatism. It is the keystone of the arch upon which the whole fabric rests. As long as Conservatism makes the fulfilment of its duties to religion the first of its purposes, it will be saved from the two principal dangers that alternatively threaten it: the danger of sinking into a mere factious variation of Liberalism, supporting the claims of another set of politicians, but propounding measures not distinguished by any pervading principle: or the other danger of standing only for the defence of those who are well off, without any sincere endeavour to consider the interests of the whole people, or any higher object than the triumph of the sagacious selfishness of the prosperous. Religion is the standard by which the plans of politicians must be judged, and a religious purpose must purify their aims and methods. Emphasising this truth, Conservatism will be the creed neither of a superfluous faction nor of a selfish class."

"In the seventh century the Arabs created a new world into which other peoples were drawn. In the nineteenth and twentieth, they were themselves drawn into a new world created in western Europe. This of course is too simple a way of describing a very complicated process, and the explanations of it can be too simple too."

"It is often assumed that Conservatism and Socialism are directly opposed. But this is not completely true. Modern Conservatism inherits the traditions of Toryism which are favourable to the activity and authority of the State. Indeed Mr. Herbert Spencer attacked Socialism as being in fact the revival of Toryism; he called it “the new Toryism.” And he was so far right, that Toryism was on the side of authority and that it was rather the Whigs, and still more the Liberals of the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, who insisted on the dangers of State interference and the importance of the liberty of the individual."

"Genuine objective journalism not only gets the facts right, it gets the meaning of events right. It is compelling not only today, but stands the test of time. It is validated not only by 'reliable sources', but by the unfolding of history. It is journalism that ten, twenty, fifty years after the fact still holds up a true and intelligent mirror to events."