“You have to recognise your responsibility to your community for your actions. Liberty doesn’t mean that you are not held accountable.”

I love horses. I spent seven years as a racing commissioner on a horse-racing board.

I think if you’re going to make political art, you have to engage at some level. You can’t just write about politics, you have to try and be politics as well.

It would shine a torch into the dirty little corner where the BNP defecate on our democracy, and that would be much more powerful than duffing them up in the street – which Im also in favour of.

That’s what I’m about — getting engaged. Too many people don’t wade in the mud with the politicians.

Mixing pop and politics he asks me what the use is / I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses.

I want to like my music before you like it. I don’t want to sell anything that I don’t really like.

So, in some ways, the political songs tend to be a bit more like reportage, whereas the love songs tend to be like novels, you can pick them up off the shelf and go into them any time.

Christianity is the only true and perfect religion; and… in proportion as mankind adopt its principles and obey its precepts, they will be wise and happy.

[A]s long as you’re comfortable it feels like freedom.

Part of the problem with some elements of the European debate is that they hanker for the days when we were a great power. Those days are gone, and they went a long time ago.

Whether we like it or not, we live in a post-ideological world. That’s how a Donald Trump can get through. He has no ideology at all: in that sense, he’s a bit like Mussolini.

War what is it good for? It’s good for business.

Just because you’re gay, I won’t turn you away. If you stick around, I’m sure we can find some common ground.

Don’t saddle me with your ideals, and spare me all your guilt. For a poet with all the answers, has never yet been built.

Freedom is merely privilege extended, unless enjoyed by one and all.

I’m still batting away on my politics for the Labour Party. I’m much further to the left of them than I used to be, but that’s because they’ve moved, not me.

The happiest people are the ones with the most community.

In communal society, where there are virtually no class divisions, man’s productive activities on outlook and culture is less discernible. Account must be taken of the psychology of conflicting classes.

Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.

When community action was put into federal law in the early sixties as part of the effort to combat poverty and social injustice, I supported it intellectually.

What I like best in Baltimore is the people, the neighborhoods and what goes on in the neighborhoods. Each has its own stories, own diners and own quirks. It’s about community. I also like everything Old Bay.

Being 15 and like a punk in the DIY community, basically being with a group of people like no one else, it was the first place to exclude or call out if people were racist, sexist, homophobic or in any way prejudiced.

Let there be no illusions about the difficulty of forming this kind of a national community. It’s tough, difficult, not easy. But a spirit of harmony will survive in America only if each of us remembers that we share a common destiny.

We must not become the new puritans and reject our society. We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done.