“Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.”

“There but for the grace of God,' said John Bradford in the sixteenth century, on seeing wretches led to execution, 'go I.' What this apparently compassionate observation really means--not that it really 'means' anything--is, 'There by the grace of God goes someone else.”

“[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.”

“Periclean Greeks employed the term idiotis, without any connotation of stupidity or subnormality, to mean simply 'a person indifferent to public affairs.' Obviously, there is something wanting in the apolitical personality. But we have also come to suspect the idiocy of politicization—of the professional pol and power broker. The two idiocies make a perfect match, with the apathy of the first permitting the depredations of the second.”

“But we do believe in religion—at least for other people. It is a means ofmarketing hope, and of instilling ethical precepts on the cheap. It is also a form of discipline.”

“I think that anti-Jewish prejudice is an unfailing sign of a sick and disordered person ... It's a horrible, conspiratorial, pseudo-intellectual, mean spirited, eventually lethal piece of bigotry.”

“The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.”