Whether or not a certain policy is viewed as legitimate very often accords with how it affects a state materially, not whether it conforms to some norm that is valued for ethical or moral reasons

As a general rule, conversations about how people have or will interact are interesting, and conversations about objects are dull

They like the economy passengers to see those trays of champagne being taken into club class. It's all part of making them feel dissatisfied in the hope they may upgrade next time.

All poetry can be seen as a conversation between poets over time

People who behave morally don’t generally do it because they have greater knowledge; they do it because they have a greater sensitivity to other people’s points of view

My objection to all my liberal friends who ran with the Iraq hawks is that they were not making the case for liberal interventionism, but for exemplary war

Forced to wait for fifteen minutes at the airport luggage carousel leaves many of us miserable and irritated. Yet if we'd spent the same waiting time walking to the carousel we'd be far happier

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community

Foreign languages are unsettling. They remind us how arbitrary the mental world we live in is

If BP really wants to kill birds, it should indeed go beyond petroleum and into wind, an industry that kills far more rare birds per joule of energy produced than oil does

One side believes it possesses an infallible book written by an omnipotent author with a huge beard with completely explains the dynamics all living things on earth. The other side believes in the literal truth of the bible

The law is agnostic about truth. It's very skeptical of ultimate truth. That's why freedom of speech permits lies to be told

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace

As the aim is to record as few strokes, rather than rack up as many runs/goals/points, as possible, its parsimony appeals to the Scotsman in every man

The Chinese language can squeeze a lot of information into a small space. One example is a single character, pronounced "zha," which means the red dots that appear on your nose when you are drunk

Our power to intervene in Darfur is inextricably linked to other elements of our hegemony, and to the militarization of our society and our economy. Like it or not, support for the former, no matter how high-minded, idealistic, and compassionate, entails the perpetuation of the latter

One of the defining features of effective bosses is that they shield their followers, whether from political manoeuvering, resource grabbing or just the innumerable distractions that go with organisational life

Easy credit has been used as a palliative throughout history by governments that are unable to address the deeper anxieties of the middle class directly

People respond to a person's perceived character much more than they do to logic

One of the most common observations in psychotherapy of people with depression or anxiety is that they hold themselves to impossibly high standards, although they have a perfectly sensible evaluation of everyone else