Westminster is a piece of this city's energy, something the contemporary world has forgotten.
In the contemporary world, we think of politeness as surface behavior, like frosting - it's sweet and attractive and finishes off the cake. But 19th century nobility and the enlightened thinkers and stoics before them viewed manners in a very different way. To them, manners are an outward expression of an inward struggle.
The thing is, we live in a contemporary world, and being able to make yourself the best person you can possible be can be difficult. But as long as you're trying to figure it out, and you're really looking in the right direction, everything's going to be all right.
The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue.
A church of dialogue in the contemporary world... a church, taking on the mission of Jesus, which is in the world not to judge humanity, but to love it and to save it.
Christians and Jews alike are the new exiles of the contemporary world, struggling with how to sing the Lord's song in a strange land.
Unquestionably, our contemporary world of music is far richer, in a sense, than earlier periods, due to the historical and geographical extensions of culture to which I have referred.
In the contemporary world, artists are almost entirely self-referential.
As a nation we have the right to decide our own affairs, to mould our own future. This does not pose any danger to anybody. Our nation is fully aware of the responsibility for its own fate in the complicated situation of the contemporary world.
Works of art produced in the contemporary world are a further expression of that. But I don't think there is an active, ongoing nihilist self-consciousness in the artist.
