“Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.”

A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.

America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.

Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.

Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.

We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.

There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.

Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

England was full of words I’d never heard before – streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.

Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

So, if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea – or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them are right.

In order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.

I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.

Although a few antibiotics have been toughened up a bit, the pharmaceutical industry hasn’t given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s.

Michael Jackson was not an artist who comes along once in a decade, a generation, or a lifetime. He was an artist who comes along only once, period… He raised the bar and then BROKE the bar!

Being spokesman for a generation is the worst job I ever had.

NY is the city it is today in part because of the contributions from generations of artistic visionaries

I’M ANGRY because the stories of injustice that have been passed down for generations seem to be continuing before our very eyes.

Never before in our country’s history has a generation been so empowered, so wealthy, so privileged – and yet so empty.

Every ten years there is a new generation of actors.

The glory of each generation is to make its own precedents.

The job is never done and every generation has to fight again.