I think the imagination helps us move out of the purely oppositional mentality and see the world in a richer and more variegated way.

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.

Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.

Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.

Philosophers should be, as Seneca put it, 'lawyers for humanity'. Make what you think and feel count; the examined life has global dimensions.

But the life that no longer trust another human being and no longer forms ties to the political community is not a human life any longer.

You can’t really change the heart without telling a story.

As human beings, we ought to be vulnerable. We shouldn't try to say that we can be self-sufficient or do everything that's necessary for a good life on our own, because we need other people.

Life is about more than earning a living, and if you're not in the habit of thinking about it, you can end up middle-aged or even older and shocked to realize that your life seems empty.

Business leaders love the humanities because they know that to innovate you need more than rote knowledge. You need a trained imagination.

Choice matters. You might have the opportunity to eat a nutritious diet, though you might choose to eat a lousy diet. What matters is the opportunity.

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

Even brave men, and D'Arnot was a brave man, are sometimes frightened by solitude.

Life is too precious to waste any of it regretting the past.

False friends leave you in times of trouble.

My little brother Paul. He owns his own floor sanding business called Silly P Hardwood Floors and hes really good.

I'll always stand by my Gypsy roots, and I'll always help out one of my own.

India is the one area of the sub-continent where we haven't won since I have been involved with England

This desire [to write] is rather strange all the same and is not without a certain "cracked" quality.

...there isn't often anything in Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting.

Women say that my election represents a cultural break with the past - a past of sexism, of misogyny.