The Pleasures Of Mental Agility Are Much

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.

It's Important To Remember That World War Ii Was Experienced Very Much As A Continuity In That Sense. Most Of World War Ii In Most Of Europe Wasn't A War; It Was An Occupation. The War Was At The Beginning And The End, Except In Germany And The Soviet Union, And Even There Really Only At The End. So The Rest Of Time It's An Occupation, Which In Some Ways Was Experienced As An Extension Of The Interwar Period. World War Ii Was Simply An Extreme Form, In A Whole New Key, Of The Disruption Of Normal Life That Began In 1914.

We Need To Start Talking About Inequality Again; We Need To Start Talking About The Inequities And Unfairnesses And The Injustices Of An Excessively Divided Society, Divided By Wealth, By Opportunity, By Outcome, By Assets And So Forth.

Social Democracy Does Not Represent An Ideal Future; It Does Not Even Represent The Ideal Past.

My Generation Those Who Were Students In The Late 60s Was Always, In The Words Of The Who, Talking About Our Generation. That's What We Thought Of Ourselves, As The Most Important Thing Since Sliced Bread. And The "we" That We Meant Was Really The Western Europeans And American Generation. And As I Think Back I Suppose I Have A Sense Of Guilt On Behalf Of My Generation, A Sense That We Were Terribly Provincial And Didn't Understand The Really Important Stuff That Was Going On In Eastern Europe.