21 Quotes by Mark Kingwell

Anywhere - and, it follows, nowhere - can be a place. As long as we are there, to think and talk, to listen and respond. The world, once conscious of itself in the form of human making, is a vast concert hall. What sounds there is not the divine music of celestial spheres, as the ancient Greek mathematicians believed, but the sound of one human after another issuing the daily plea: to be heard, to be understood, to be accommodated.

We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging.

We don’t know what the future will bring, but that’s because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit.

Ambition is ever tempered by experience. Otherwise, fortune makes fools of us all.

Concrete is momentarily unformed matter seeking its natural completion, filling in the last corners of its allowed space, finding a form. It is possibility rendered material, hope in an industrial-strength mixer.

All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices.

We are capitalism made flesh.

Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought.

How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us?