“To truly esteem oneself means that one must be capable of feeling shame or self-disgust when one does not live up to a certain standard”

“For Hegel, freedom was not just a psychological phenomenon, but the essence of what was distinctively human. In this sense, freedom and nature are diametrically opposed. Freedom does not mean the freedom to live in nature or according to nature; rather, freedom begins only where nature ends. Human freedom emerges only when man is able to transcend his natural, animal existence, and to create a new self for himself. The emblematic starting point for this process of self-creation is the struggle to the death for pure prestige.”

“It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master”

“The effect of education on political attitudes is complicated,for democratic society. The self-professed aim of modern educationis to "liberate" people from prejudices and traditional formsof authority. Educated people are said not to obey authorityblindly, but rather learn to think for themselves. Even if thisdoesn't happen on a mass basis, people can be taught to see theirown self-interest more clearly, and over a longer time horizon.Education also makes people demand more of themselves and forthemselves; in other words, they acquire a certain sense of dignitywhich they want to have respected by their fellow citizens and bythe state. In a traditional peasant society, it is possible for a locallandlord (or, for that matter, a communist commissar) to recruitpeasants to kill other peasants and dispossess them of their land.They do so not because it is in their interest, but because they areused to obeying authority. Urban professionals in developed countries, on the other hand, can be recruited to a lot of nuttycauses like liquid diets and marathon running, but they tend notto volunteer for private armies or death squads simply becausesomeone in a uniform tells them to do so”

“Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.”

“But it is not necessarily the case that liberal democracy is the political system best suited to resolving social conflicts per se. A democracy's ability to peacefully resolve conflicts is greatest when those conflicts arise between socalled "interest groups" that share a larger, pre-existing consensus on the basic values or rules of the game, and when the conflicts are primarily economic in nature. But there are other kinds of non-economic conflicts that are far more intractable, having to do with issues like inherited social status and nationality, that democracy is not particularly good at resolving.”

“recent events compel us to raise anew. From the beginning, themost serious and systematic attempts to write Universal Histories saw the central issue in history as the development of Freedom. History was not a blind concatenation of events, but a meaningful whole in which human ideas concerning the nature of a just political and social order developed and played themselves out. And if we are now at a point where we cannot imagine a world substantially different from our own, in which there is no apparent or obvious way in which the future will represent a fundamental improvement over our current order, then we must also take into consideration the possibility that History itself might be at an end.”