Three Aphorisms Of The Transparent Ironist

(a) One person's liberating 'holism' is another person's oppressive 'totalitarianism'.

(b) People who claim to be tolerant at one level are often virulently intolerant at another level, so that their surface tolerance becomes a mask for their subterranean intolerance. One must remember in all such cases that tolerance necessarily presupposes some form of exclusion, and to say that one tolerates 'everyone and everything' is to make a vacuous statement.

(c) How to speak with, to and for those who have suffered without glorifying suffering in the process; how to forge contingent forms of solidarity without skating over differences and disparities : these are perhaps the two most complicated tasks for our troubled times.