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" When you are in my classroom, you get everything from me. But you bloody well better give everything too. "

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" For Europe to play a part in the world on the scale of its wealth and its population and its capacities, Europe has to be united in some way, and Europe is not united. "

" In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. "

" Reality is a powerful solvent. "

" Healthcare reform is a paradigmatic case. It is self-evidently necessary and inevitable and has been on the agenda for 35 years, and the political class seems completely unable to respond to it. "

" Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? "

" I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all. "

" My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books. "

" History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it. "

" History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same. "

" There is nothing to be said for being crippled. You don't see the world better or clearer, nor do you develop some special set of skills by way of compensation. "

" I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when. "

" What has gone catastrophically wrong in England and the States is that for 30 years we've lost the ability to talk about the state in positive terms. We've raised a generation or two of young people who don't think to ask, 'What can the state do that is good?' "

" As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge. "

" Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over. "

" I would say that I have become more radical as I have gotten older. I started out very radical when I was young, like most people, but I became less actively politically engaged in the middle of my life. "

" I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action. "

" Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life. "

" 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 denied. I've seen this first-hand. "

" You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps. "

" 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 achievements. That these were always incomplete should not trouble us. "

" Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish. "

" 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 best speakers and writers of my age cohort. I don't mean I was the best historian - a quite different measure. "

" I do think we're on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don't know how to talk about it. "

" It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel. "

" I think if I'm controversial it's not because I set out to be. It's because I've never felt comfortable being part of someone else's mainstream community. "

" If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. "

" American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies. "

" The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people. "

" I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception. "

" 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 possibilities for which we, in turn, owe them something. One of the things we owe them is not to squander them. "