A poet laureate of adolescent sexuality and middle-age longing.

No longer a mark of distinction or proof of achievement, a college education is these days a mere rite of passage, a capstone to adolescent party time.

Where a generation ago people felt entitled to a chance at education, they now feel entitled to the credential affirming that they have completed a course of study regardless of their actual mastery.

Ultimately it is the yearning to believe that anyone can be brought up to college level that has brought colleges down to everyone's level.

Any departure from fact is the first step on a slippery slope toward unbelievability.

The fact is that some people are better than others - smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace.

The dominant mood of contemporary American culture is the self-celebration of the peasantry.

The very essence of school is elitism. Schools exist to teach, to test, to rank hierarchically to promote the idea that knowing and understanding more is better than knowing and understanding less.

In my mind, partial failure is always better than delusory success.

It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the Moon as to put a bone in your nose.

What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their finding-places in a woman's dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!

If you don't understand that you work for your mislabeled 'subordinates', then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny.

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.

The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

I hoped that it would be possible to slide slowly from my public life back to the life of teaching and writing that I had always wanted. But things didn't work out that way.

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?

Children from humble families must be taught how to command just as other children must be taught how to obey.

I'll admit I'm a workaholic.

Though I never shout at Labour Members or insult them, I can never understand the psychology of some of our men who endeavoured to reason with them.

It looks tough for Palace when you see some of the results they've got coming up.