Perhaps in a book review it is not out of place to note that the safety of the state depends on cultivating the imagination.

When you close your eyes to tragedy, you close your eyes to greatness.

Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

All great power has to do to destroy itself is persist in trying to do the impossible.

Thou shalt not let a day pass without rereading something great.

As a rule, the most dangerous ideas are not the ones that divide people but those on which they agree.

Like all wage slaves, he had two crosses to bear: the people he worked for and the people he worked with

To state a lie firmly, categorically and with great authority, undeterred by the fact that all concerned know it to be a lie, is one of the principal activities defined by the term practising law.

Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not.

Is it possible that I am not alone in believing that in the dispute between Galileo and the Church, the Church was right and the centre of man's universe is the earth?

The Tanakee are thought to possess strange, almost supernatural powers.Their eyes are described as large and hypnotic." From Tribe of the Teddy Bear

The pain for her and the love for her was so entwined that neither would function without the other.

Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

The higher up, the harder the fall.

The accents are really really funny. I think I could convince somebody I was from New Zealand.

I've never gone on Facebook and am not sure I understand it. The same goes for Twitter. I have someone sending tweets and pretending to be me, but I don't know why.

Success? You can't get a big head about it. When people stare at me, they could be whispering to their friend, "That guy sucks! Have you seen him before? He's horrible."

I think Bush understands the Internet and the incredible expansion of global e-commerce.

Imperialism is an institution under which one nation asserts the right to seize the land or at least to control the government or resources of another people.

I think it is good escapist entertainment even though it's bad.