I think there are two ways in which people are controlled - first of all frighten people and secondly demoralize them.

There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought, over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up.

The way a government treats refugees is very instructive.

If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.

Britain today is suffering from galloping obsolescence.

The Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it - a bit like Christians in the Church of England.

We are paying a heavy political price for 20 years in which, as a party, we have played down our criticism of capitalism and soft-peddled our advocacy of socialism

The Tory party is the enemy of democracy.

I think very often the boat-rockers turn out to be the people who are building the craft

The flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen.

I did not enter the Labour Party 47 years ago to have our manifesto written by Dr Mori, Dr Gallup and Mr Harris

The soul, they say, is divine and the flesh is iniquity. But I am a musician and I ask this - without the wood and the strings of the violin, where would the sonata find form?

Think of it. Going to sleep and waking up later in a science fiction future. It'll be fantastic. The shock and the wonder of it.

If man studied himself, he would see how incapable he is of going further.

Many great opportunities are not cheap

Some call it schizophrenia, I call it a career

For every good song, I write 20 bad ones I have to chuck away.

Every hour you spend writing is an hour you don't spend worrying about your writing.

Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy.

Generosity is a lovely attribute, and we only practice it when relationships are more important to us than our possessions.

Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an ever smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose