“I have never consciously exploited the fact that I am a woman. I wouldn’t dare try that even if I knew how to. I have too much respect for my male colleagues to think they would be particualrly impressed.”

You see, another reason for nationalization was that private ownership meant fragmentation.

It was very much a cry for democratic control at that time. Above all, breaking the accomplished power of a few people to rule the lives of everybody else.

Why get rid of Chamberlain to put in Halifax? It’s like getting rid of the organ-grinder to put in the monkey.

Large motorway flyovers are the cathedrals of the modern world.

And what always struck me about that war period was how even Churchill had to talk socialism to keep up people’s morale.

He described how, as a boy of 14, his dad had been down the mining pit, his uncle had been down the pit, his brother had been down the pit, and of course he would go down the pit.

Britain in the 1970s was undoubtedly an economic mess because of the oil price explosion.

I remember people who’d had a lot of hardship during the war. They’d thought we’d won.

I will fight for what I believe in until I drop dead. And that’s what keeps you alive.

Think, think, think. It will hurt like hell at first, but you’ll get used to it.

And that will increasingly dawn on people. The demand for controlling the commanding heights will grow.

In politics, guts is all.

Every male in the world thinks he’s an excellent driver. Every copper who’s ever had to pick an eyeball out of a puddle knows that most of them are kidding themselves.

Male genitals are still called “the tree of life” by the Arabs, and a cross was one of the oldest diagrammatic images of male genitals.

The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang.

A recent survey or North American males found 42% were overweight, 34% were critically obese and 8% ate the survey.

Most attractive males talk to most attractive women as if they were Rotarians comparing sales percentages in Des Moines.

Nancy [Kassebaum] and I worked on a women’s health agenda when I first came. Women were not included in the protocols at NIH, the famous study, ‘take an aspirin a day, keep the doctor, you know, a heart attack away.’ It was done on ten thousand male medical students.

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

When I work on a piece I always think if there is an abundance of male characters which one could we change to a woman or a minority character.