He [Winston Churchill] is a man suffering from petrified adolescence.

No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it

How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.

No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets

The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do.

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.

The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.

We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land.

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Life is a continuum of problems to solve and lessons to learn. Once you accept this truth, then the problem you’re facing is no longer a problem but rather an opportunity to learn.

The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.

If you want to treat your book as a child, the finished book should be an adult, capable to stand on its own legs and able to weather the thunder. Not a baby that still needs to be defended.

A shaman’s activities as a sorcerer, or his own conscious act of entry into the supernatural world, were a kind of “killing”.

Disappointing cakes have often been sitting out too long. They should last just long enough to have the last pieces the next morning with coffee - who doesn't love cake with coffee?

I do love Italian food. Any kind of pasta or pizza. My new pig out food is Indian food. I eat Indian food like three times a week. It's so good.

Task performed by an unintelligent person should not be rated high.

When you go out on the mound and you're confident in your body, you feel you can do anything.

If gun control bore any relation to homicide rates, Washington, DC would be the safest place in the country.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.