08/02/2026

Without the gift of love, moreover, the world can never be a home. No amount of good fortune can make it one, nor can any system of rights, however elaborate and punctiliously enforced. My rights enhance my power. They increase my self-control. But in the absence of love, they leave me to face the world alone, in the company of other anxious and self-protective men and women, for each of whom the world is only a wilderness of opportunity and risk.

— Anthony T. Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan