Mark Kingwell quotes:

Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.

If anyone is tweeting right now, I'm not pulling a knife on David Cronenberg!

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.

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

If you have ever been accused of being rude when you were merely stating the truth, or called a gossip because you like to dwell on other people's actions, Westacott is for you. His linked studies of everyday vices offer elegant analysis of the goods that lurk in behavior that is usually condemned. This wise book is practical philosophy in the best sense.

Concrete is momentarily unformed matter seeking its natural completion, filling in the last corners of its allowed space, finding a form. It is possibility rendered material, hope in an industrial-strength mixer.

Dreams are evidence that we are creatures who produce more meaning than we can ourselves understand.

Friendship requires a leap, not of faith but of regard.

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

Socrates was likewise right that pissing people off is how we first, and maybe best, go about the business of provoking thought.

Tyranny is abhorrent, freedom benefits all, whereas violence benefits no one for long.

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.

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.

All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices.

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

How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us?

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

Neiman's book is written with considerable flair, as many critics have already noted, but it possesses a far rarer and more valuable quality: moral seriousness. Her argument builds a powerful emotional force, a sense of deep inevitability. . . . It is not often that a work of such dark conclusions has felt so hopeful and brave.

Never before, I suspect, have so many people been so rich to so little purpose.

Our desires are never wholly transparent, even to ourselves.

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.

We are capitalism made flesh.

We don't know what the future will bring, but that's because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit.