No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than ''politicians'' think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life begin when you get what you want

People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.

The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods

People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.