And yet, despite the high moral and ethical quality of social commiseration, political dedication and a deep commitment to equity, there was something rather disturbing about standard leftwing politics of that time: in particular, its scepticism of process-oriented political thinking, including democratic procedures that permit pluralism. The major institutions of democracy got no more credit than what could be portioned out to what was seen as "bourgeois democracy," on the deficiencies of which the critics were most vocal. The power of money in many democratic practices was rightly identified, but the alternatives – including the terrible abuses of non-oppositional politics – did not receive serious critical scrutiny.

I think it's … the profession is starting to realise that in part it's the general climate, and the way we treat each other is not conducive for having more women in the profession. It's not just about promotion but it's about the general environment and how people talk to each other and address each other in seminars and things like that, that we need to work on a culture that is more respectful and that will be more acceptable for many women who think that they don't want to play the games of shouting at each other.

Perhaps we should give athletes the right to take a mental break from media scrutiny on a rare occasion without being subject to strict sanctions. In any other line of work, you would be forgiven for taking a personal day here and there, so long as it's not habitual.

It is simplistic in the following sense that you cannot institute democracy from above. It’s a very difficult process. And democracy is not the only dimension of institutions that matters. Although my work does emphasise that democracy by itself matters as well. But the problem is really alive today in the industrialised world, where you would think, and many political scientists have claimed that democracy is safe and secure and would never be under threat. It is under threat. Support for democracy is at an all time low, not just in the US, although really jarringly in the US but not just in the US, throughout the western world. So democracy is not easy to make work because democracy is about democratic citizenship. It’s about consensus, it’s about communication. It’s about accepting defeat, making compromises, talking and understanding the other side. All of those things are always difficult. They become more difficult during times of turbulence, which, you know, we are living through and they become harder when the infrastructure, for example, the communication infrastructure, makes this sort of democratic citizenship harder, which I think is not the only factor. But social media has certainly played that role.

inversion frequently will solve problems which nothing else will solve. And in life, unless you’re more gifted than Einstein, inversion will help you solve problems that you can't solve in other ways.

wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty.

The highest form that civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another. That's the way an operating room works at the Mayo Clinic. If a bunch of lawyers were to introduce a lot of process, the patients would all die. So never forget, when you're a lawyer, that you may be rewarded for selling this stuff, but you don't have to buy it. In your own life, what you want is a seamless web of deserved trust. And if your proposed marriage contract has forty-seven pages, my suggestion is you not enter.

They win the respect, the deserved trust, of the people they deal with, and there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust. And so the way to get it is to deliver what you’d want to buy if the circumstances were reversed.

Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity.

Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something and your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion.