Sublime

He was conservative because he cared for their past, and liberal because he cared for their future. But he was much more than this.

That is the unique tragedy of the plutocratic state to–day; it has no successes to hold up against the failures it alleges to exist in Latin or other methods.

Where Balibar, as a consequence, sees our inconvertible cruelty as always about to undermine our politics, and our confidence in politics, Wendy Brown sees neoliberalism – which she defines in Undoing the Demos as ‘a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms’ – as ‘quietly undoing basic elements of democracy

The best we could hope for is a modest kind of politics, one in which we do not seek to implement an ideal but in which we grant people maximum freedom to pursue the different and conflicting ideals that constitute the human situation.

If the capacity to love is part of what it means to be human, then to assume that someone is incapable of love is to see them as less than human;

So long as people stay as they are, no reform, however powerful, can correct an evil. Therefore the correction of an evil cannot come about through any change in the form of our life, but through the spread of goodness and rationality. Tolstoy

Socrates—who, like Adam Smith, argued that people are generally good even without enforcement.