There's no point in worrying about things you can't influence.

I've never been much given to little social cliques.

Fairness is not about statistical equality.

If someone is being very cheeky, it can be quite fun to deal with that situation.

For far too long the House of Commons has been run as little more than a private club by and for gentleman amateurs.

I pride myself on being courteous to people, and trying to fashion good relations.

I am seeking every day to restore faith in Parliament - to ensure we have a House of Commons which is representative, effective and reconnected to the people we serve.

I never aspired to be Speaker simply so I could say, 'I am the Speaker of the House of Commons,' and tell my children that.

I think the record shows that as Speaker, I have taken the lead in cleaning up politics.

I don't want to crawl over the entrails of past disputes.

It's a cowardly form of politics to use my spouse to beat me.

All that day she felt as if she were acting in a theatre with better actors than herself, and that her bad performance was spoiling the whole affair.

My experience politically has always been that one-word definition of politics: money. Keep your eye on the buck. And that tells you where the American people are going to be.

When somebody you've known for 20 years, and with whom you have a full context, winks at you or whatever, it can be huge. I think in a sense what you're trying to re-create in fiction is that.

Africa the continent is not just what we see on the news. It's... not AIDS, and it's not just war and poverty. It's so much more. It's an abundant continent, and Botswana is an abundant place.

"I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else"

Dear Mr. President, can I ask you a question, when the bombs fall down will they hurt everyone in my family?

One of the things that wrong with pictures today, I think, is that so many of the people making them started out wanting to.

It bothers me when I can't, for example, remember a name. I don't know if it's pre-senility or whether there are too many names packed in our brains.

How much filth there is in the church, even among those who, in the priesthood, should belong entirely to Him. How much pride, how much self-sufficiency.

People are so wonderful that a photographer has only to wait for that breathless moment to capture what he wants on film.