“The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.”

There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.

True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.

Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.

It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.

The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.

A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.

The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.

We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.

I would say, based on the little I know, Darwinism explains microevolution within species quite well. As to its broader consequence and implications, I don’t think it explains individual species evolution at all well.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

I am pleased to see from the laughter on the Ministerial benches that there is no implication on their part to take Sir Oswald Mosley too seriously. It can easily be seen to-day that this idea of a dictator is gradually falling down.

The implications, to me, are immense. I mean, how far can it go?

The consequences, [screw] the implications of the actions, to hell with it all… whatever happens as a result is better than the nothingness that is inevitable with silence.

There is no such thing as talking about class without there being implications of the racial history of the United States. You just can’t do it.

So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.