I believe abortion should be available to everyone, but the law should be changed. In the past I voted for a restriction to 22 weeks, and I would be prepared to go down to 20.

The true use of history, whether civil or military, is not to make man clever for the next time, it is to make him wise forever.

The important thing when you are going to do something brave is to have someone on hand to witness it.

A common language is the most obvious binding element in any society.

What is Parliament for if it is not to be a means to make ministers accountable for the services for which they are responsible.

So long as the international community consists of sovereign states, war between them remains a possibility, of which all governments have to take reasonable account.

History is what we read, write and think about the past.

Let us be clear. Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists, and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice.

We're not saying, 'We're politicians, trust us.' We know you don't trust us.

We must rediscover the habit of thinking the best of each other

There is only one opinion poll that I am interested in and that is the one that will take place on election day.

I refuse to give up when things go wrong because there is always a sliver lining behind the cloud.

As far as my notoriety or whatever, I haven't been the star of a hit film.

The belly has no ears nor is it to be filled with fair words.

The opposite of compromise is character.

I don't get even, I get odder.

To take up the cross of Christ is no great action done once for all; it consists in the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us.

That rewriting of literary history is most obvious in the case of The Yage Letters, where I was able to show that the true history inverts the official one.

Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.

For better or worse, the United States enjoys the lion's share of public and media attention. We influence much of the conversation on social and public media by sheer volume.