“the distinction between rich nations and poor nations is one of the great dominant political and international themes of our century.”

We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.

Our physical unity has gone far ahead of our moral unity.

If a man has lived in a tradition which tells him that nothing can be done about his human condition, to believe that progress is possible may well be the greatest revolution of all.

Business shouldn’t be like sports, separating the men from the women.

The raw material from which social institutions are fashioned is always more or less recalcitrant and any human society will tend to produce a caricature of itself.

Jews were the first to believe that history itself has meaning and that progress, not repetition, is the law of life.

To me, one of the proofs that there is a moral governance in the universe is the fact that when people and governments work intelligently and far-sightedly for the good of others, they achieve their own prosperity, too.

Fear can indeed be the beginning of wisdom.

It is a fact of history that those who seek to withdraw from its great experiments usually end up being overwhelmed by them.

There is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavour and then leave it half done. This is what the West has done with its colonial system. It shook all the societies in the world loose from their old moorings. But it seems indifferent whether or not they reach safe harbour in the end.

To act without rapacity, to use knowledge with wisdom, to respect interdependence, to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival.

We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that “we choose death.”

in modern society, fear of unemployment remains the darkest of the shadows thrown by the past. In an industrial order, a man out of work is almost a man out of life.

Every single ancient wisdom and religion will tell you the same thing – don’t live entirely for yourself, live for other people. Don’t get stuck inside your own ego, because it will become a prison in no time flat.

It is very much easier for a rich man to invest and grow richer than for the poor man to begin investing at all. And this is also true of nations.

man’s oldest and least reputable occupation – war.

Bashar Assad has said many things. We will see in the near term whether he is serious about a political process.

I would strongly urge the Donald Trump administration to pick someone who is completely apolitical, who doesn’t come out of the political process

If, as we decided in Munich, there will be a cessation of hostilities and humanitarian assistance can flow into Syria – then this will open the door for the beginning of the political transition process.

There is a political process which we are trying to achieve through what is called the Vienna Group.

In response, Krzhizhanovsky’s prose has a recklessly unstable tone in which delighted examination of impossible worlds can slip into ferocious political sarcasm.

But alas, they are all sadly deficient, because they leave us under the domination of political and religious prejudices

Some critics have commented that understanding the specific Brazilian political context of the novel is helpful for reading Quiet Creature. This may be true, but it’s not prerequisite for understanding it.

Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers