Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic.

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.

A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.

Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.

Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.

Great faith, Great hope, Great courage.

Injustice results as much from treating unequals equally as from treating equals unequally.

Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.

For those who lead, they have an obligation to create a better life for the people around them.

History: gossip well told.

I really wanted to focus on my songwriting, or songwriting with other people. I wanted to go learn from other people who were really good at the classic, more traditional idea of songwriting.

I hold the line, the line of strength that pulls me from the fear.

The clustering of technological innovation in time and space helps explain both the uneven growth among nations and the rise and decline of hegemonic powers.

When you stack up all the years we are allowed against all there is to read, time is very short indeed.

My father gave me my dreams. Thanks to him, I could see a future.