Mark Kingwell

"For every apparent gain, in short, we now observe a balancing danger. This is the world we have created."

"We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging."

"Paradoxically, the problems of politics often arise not in the form of a problem of scarcity, but as one of abundance."

"We dont know what the future will bring, but thats because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit."

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

"Politics is rather the creation of the best possible polity out of the deep inner needs of its citizenry - who are only some of its members."

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

"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 the first."

"War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others."

"It wasnt atheism and corruption they feared, but inquiry."

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

"Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought."