Mark Kingwell

I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.

— Mark Kingwell

War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others.

— Mark Kingwell

We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging.

— Mark Kingwell

Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought.

— Mark Kingwell

It wasn't atheism and corruption they feared, but inquiry.

— Mark Kingwell

Politics is rather the creation of the best possible polity out of the deep inner needs of its citizenry - who are only some of its members.

— Mark Kingwell

Our desires are never wholly transparent, even to ourselves.

— Mark Kingwell

But what I mean is not as odd as it might sound - and is by no means intended as the last word on the subject, only the first.

— Mark Kingwell

Ambition is ever tempered by experience. Otherwise, fortune makes fools of us all.

— Mark Kingwell

Friendship requires a leap, not of faith but of regard.

— Mark Kingwell

Tyranny is abhorrent, freedom benefits all, whereas violence benefits no one for long.

— Mark Kingwell

It is only through a devoted attention to the details of objects and faces in the modern urban scene, he argues, that the commodity fetish of capitalism can be effectively dispelled.

— Mark Kingwell

Dreams are evidence that we are creatures who produce more meaning than we can ourselves understand.

— Mark Kingwell

Socrates was likewise right that pissing people off is how we first, and maybe best, go about the business of provoking thought.

— Mark Kingwell

For every apparent gain, in short, we now observe a balancing danger. This is the world we have created.

— Mark Kingwell

Paradoxically, the problems of politics often arise not in the form of a problem of scarcity, but as one of abundance.

— Mark Kingwell

All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices.

— Mark Kingwell

How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us?

— Mark Kingwell

Never before, I suspect, have so many people been so rich to so little purpose.

— Mark Kingwell

We don't know what the future will bring, but that's because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit.

— Mark Kingwell