The updated version of Descartes’s Cogito is ‘I am seen, therefore I am’ – and that the more people who see me, the more I am…

The main point about civility is...the ability to interact with strangers without holding
their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or to renounce
some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place.

We live in a world of communication - everyone gets information about everyone else. There is universal comparison and you don't just compare yourself with the people next door, you compare yourself to people all over the world and with what is being presented as the decent, proper and dignified life. It's the crime of humiliation.

In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.

We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.

We already have - thanks to technology, development, skills, the efficiency of our work - enough resources to satisfy all human needs. But we don't have enough resources, and we are unlikely ever to have, to satisfy human greed.