25 Hay Festival

We can’t ensure equality between any set of people since inequality is built into all societies. Equality is an ideal for which we should strive at all times, but today meritocracy makes it even more unrealistic than ever.

The first pages of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.

No
Languages are subject to evolution like all biological phenomena. Some will flourish, more will die. It will matter to scholars, intellectuals and the organisers of nature reserves but not to the many people who in the past have given up a less useful or prestigious language for a more useful or prestigious one. Something that is always happening.

City can learn from country that retiring to a house in Felindre is not enough to turn us into farmers or shepherds. Country can learn from city that it occupies a very large area but nowadays a very small minority of the population