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

"War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more…"

"Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose …"

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

"Politics is rather the creation of the best possible polity out of the deep inner needs of its citizenry - who are on…"

"Our desires are never wholly transparent, even to ourselves."

"But what I mean is not as odd as it might sound - and is by no means intended as the last word on the subject, only t…"

"Ambition is ever tempered by experience. Otherwise, fortune makes fools of us all."

"Friendship requires a leap, not of faith but of regard."

"Tyranny is abhorrent, freedom benefits all, whereas violence benefits no one for long."