I don’t claim to know Israel. I don’t speak Hebrew; my contacts are pretty limited. But I didn’t know Vietnam; I didn’t know Nicaragua, El Salvador or Honduras. It doesn’t mean you can’t reach your conclusions.
Category Archive: 1953
My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.
I am constitutionally competent to contest the elections.
The responsibility of political philosophy that tries to engage with practice is to be clear, or at least accessible.
Pakistan’s future viability, stability and security lie in empowering its people and building political institutions. My goal is to prove that the fundamental battle for the hearts and minds of a generation can be accomplished only under democracy.
Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.
To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
When you grow up in an extended family, or in a stable neighborhood with two or three generations of families who live there, you feel seen. Not just the good things you’ve done, the stuff you put on your resume. You know they’ve seen you in your dark times, when you’ve messed up – but they’re still there.
Black prophetic fire is the hypersensitivity to the suffering of others that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom.
The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.