When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations, the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre.
Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.
Every human being has an assortment of diverse identities, and it greatly matters which one is triggered by social situations, which hold up different kinds of mirrors. The same is true for nations.
The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places.
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
Nations have come under the control of haters and fools.
The rewards of freedom are always sweet, but its demands are stern, for at its heart is the paradox that the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.
The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.