You are, madame, so perfectly armoured, so completely sure of yourself.''Now I wonder, if I am to take that as a compliment?''It is, perhaps, a warning--not to treat life with arrogance.

How well you express it! That is exactly the curse of a politician's life. He has to bow to the country's feeling, however dangerous and foolhardy he knows it to be.

I think I said that every generation had its weaklings--that that was one of the penalties of greatness--but that their failings were seldom remembered by posterity.

Nature repeats herself more than one would imagine. The sea has infinitely more variety.

...But even then you have to reckon with a criminal's chief vice.''What is that?'' Conceit. A criminal never believes that his crime can fail.

Popular feeling is very often sentimental, muddle-headed, and eminently unsound, but it cannot be disregarded for all that.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

Using for a noble purpose is still using.

Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.

You know because you’ve been it, and I know because I’m dead and it gives one such a wonderfully uncluttered perspective.

Anti-Semitism is extremely common.

The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom.

How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something

So I think that we're in a very heightened and somewhat unusual period of politics and polling around the countries that New Zealanders take close interest in.

Now to understand the significance of chastity within us, we have to know that chastity is the foundation of all dharmas. Unless and until you have sense of chastity you cannot have dharma.

I had a lot of classical influences. I had classical music and opera and literature, but I also liked sleaze. And putting it together, sleaze and glamour, it just made sense to me.