I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned.

The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.

You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.

I can ruthlessly press my imagination out beyond its very edges, and even in such a remote place I have not begun to touch the barest periphery of God’s imagination.

Non-comprehenders are often distressed. Not you, though-because with good humor you're blessed. After all, your thoughts went like this, I dare say: It was none but the Lord who made us that way.

As you know, Microsoft eventually kind of grabbed the gold ring out of Apple's hands, I guess.

Go at least once a year to a place you've never been before.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances.

If someone is doing something crazy - or what I think is crazy - I'm watching, but also am I keeping the actual seriousness of someone actually running for president in my mind all the time?

As a theoretical physicist, I feel at once proud and humble at the thought of the illustrious figures that have preceded me here to receive the greatest of all honors in science, the Nobel prize.

There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated.

I know that there are many things I could do, but I'm not interested. It's more important to be loving and to have a lively mind.