Margaret Atwood:

These are not lectures about how to get out of debt; rather, they’re about the debtor/creditor twinship in the broadest sense – from human sacrifice to pawnshops to revenge. In this light, what we owe and how we pay is a feature of all human societies, and profoundly shapes our shared values and our cultures.

From the archive, Alberto Manguel's Massey Lectures:

The end of ethnic nationalism, building societies around sets of common values, seems like a good idea. But something is going wrong.