“Bullock by name, and Bullock by nature.”

The Welfare State, South Africa – and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.

Evil is a form of incompetence.

Take any important issue of our time – Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race,

A nation’s sense of its history is indistinguishable from its social cohesion.

Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law.

The corruption of people is to behave in an inhuman way.

Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive.

But to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.

No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade.

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past.

Hitler had a plausible case to argue when he claimed that the Anschluss was only the application of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination.

If the country is to survive as a democracy it will depend on voters who understand how our political institutions have evolved and the events that went into their creation.

We write our names in the sand: and then the waves roll in and wash them away.

Your name is a song my thoughts dance on until they reach the tip of my quill.

It’s nameless, this feeling between you and me.

There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.

War is death. If we are to engage in war, then we should have to stare it straight in the face and call it by its rightful name.

I sold my soul to the devil in L.A. He said ‘sign your name here on the dotted line and your songs they all will play.’

If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.

We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.