EB Christen

“Is it gone for ever? I’m not certain. But I tell you it was a good world to live in. I belong to it. So do you.”
― George Orwell, Coming Up for Air

“Paradoxically, it is the “convertible competencies” of the present elites, the fact that they are equally fit to run a bank in Bulgaria or in Bangladesh or to teach in Athens or Tokyo, that makes people so suspicious of them. People fear that in times of trouble, the meritocrats will opt to leave instead of sharing the cost of staying.

In this sense, meritocratic elites contrast with land-owning aristocratic elites, who are devoted to their estates and cannot take their estates with them in case they want to run away. They also contrast with communist elites, who always had better goods, better health care, and better education. But what they did not have was the power to leave; it was always easier for an ordinary person to emigrate.”
― Ivan Krastev, After Europe

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis wrote, also in The Atlantic.”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“In the case of the Levant, it is mere question-begging rhetoric to insist that similarities are more fundamental or essential than differences. For who is to say, where human groups and their interestsare in question, what is fundamental and what is secondary, what is essential and what is accidental? And even if the answers were clear, they could not by themselves determine a political decision. Political decisions are not scientific conclusions; they are rather the promptings of the practical judgment, in which play their part inclination and duty, circumstance and foresight.”
― Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version: And Other Middle Eastern Studies