Top Highlights

• What is morally objectionable about the practice of apologising for these wrongs now, is that it depends upon a concept of collective and inherited guilt which is indefensible.
• The objection to this rage against the past is essentially the same as the objection to historical apologies. It seeks to remove memorials of the past because the past did not share the values of the present. This is an irrational and absurd thing to do. What has happened has happened. It will not unhappen, however angry we are about it.
• History is morally neutral. We have a duty to understand why things happened as they did, but apologising for them or trying to efface them is morally worthless.
• We are all revolutionaries now, controlling our own fate. So when we commemorate Magna Carta, perhaps the first question that we should ask ourselves is this: do we really need the force of myth to sustain our belief in democracy? Do we need to derive our belief in democracy and the rule of law from a group of muscular conservative millionaires fro...
• People are much more strongly influenced by emotion and identity than they are by economic facts and projections. They are also more attracted to upbeat and optimistic messages, however misleading, than they are to relentless forecasts of doom, especially economic doom.