Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.

Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.

Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future.

Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom.

What can art really do in the face of atrocity?

The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.

Nations don't start out. There is not a particular moment when they unveil the essence of themselves. They are always a work in progress.

But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.

I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected.

When dreams come true, you won't realize unless they were dreams of bad fate.

I want you to be my last kiss of the year and the first of next

My family comes first. Maybe that's what makes me different from other guys.

If the physical perfection of childhood could last, what a possesssion it would be for humanity!

What I say is I am somebody who cares about conservative ideas. I want to see them implemented in governance.

It's nice because success has allowed me to have a blast on stage, to be in the studio with amazing people, but I find it all a bit bizarre.

I achieved what I want to achieve and I want to continue doing something else.

The Federal Reserve the privately owned U.S. central bank definitely caused The Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one third from 1929 to 1933.

Someone has somewhere commented on the fact that millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Dare, will, keep silence.