“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”

I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.

Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.

It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.

Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.

Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.

Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.

Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.

The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.

Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.

It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.

And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.

I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.

The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.

Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.

Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?

No one is more cherished in this world than someone who lightens the burden of another. Thank you.

The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.

Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift. Thy claim it as their own and none can keep it from them.

She said nothing, and Sir Andrew, too, was silent, yet those two young people understood one another, as young people have a way of doing all the world over, and have done since the world began.

Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.

Kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.

Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need.

The law is what it is-a majestic edifice, sheltering all of us, each stone of which rests on another.