“We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.”

In the end we are all sacked and it’s always awful. It is as inevitable as death following life. If you are elevated there comes a day when you are demoted. Even Prime Ministers.

There’s nothing so improves the mood of the Party as the imminent execution of a senior colleague.

The more you know about a species, the more you understand about how better to help protect them.

There are no true friends in politics.

Give a civil servant a good case and he’ll wreck it with clichés, bad punctuation, double negatives, and convoluted apology.

The only solution is to kill 600 people in one night. Let the UN and Bill Clinton and everyone else make a scene – and it is over for 20 years.

I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and by manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives.

When an individual appears mean and lazy, we are only seeing one part of the person.

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.

George had taken off all ten of his fingers and tied them into a bundle with what appeared to be either his own small intestines.

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

I`m very cautious about what appears to be things put in place that will begin to roll back some of the progress that I believe we`ve made.

If a man must make himself appear cheerful; he must know why he is miserable.