In one of my favorite anecdotes about Foucault, someone asks him why he writes books. He responds by saying something like "When I begin to write a b…

- Thomas L. Dumm

I worry that we don't currently have a democracy in the United States. Instead we have what [political philosopher] Sheldon Wolin has recently labele…

- Thomas L. Dumm

Usually, we think that "good" loneliness is what we call "solitude," the choice of some alone-time. But I want to press on with the negative dimensio…

- Thomas L. Dumm

Worldwide, the twentieth century has seen the rise of extraordinary concentrations of economic and political power - evoking the people as the source…

- Thomas L. Dumm

None of us is perfect, but the point of our writing is to try to become better, to learn something that we may not have already realized, about ourse…

- Thomas L. Dumm

One of the reasons I always come back to representations of loneliness in plays, films, and literature is that they give us specific examples of the …

- Thomas L. Dumm

I look back on some of my early reviews of others, and realize to my chagrin that I've been as guilty as anybody else on that front.

- Thomas L. Dumm

As lovers of truth, we want to be close to it. Sometimes - evil thought, evil temptation - we want to be close to it by misleading others about its p…

- Thomas L. Dumm

I'm pretty sure my dog, Pip, gets lonely when there is no one to be with him. But we humans can end up with a gnawing worry about that separation pos…

- Thomas L. Dumm