“Human history in essence is the history of ideas.”

There’s nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn’t abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century – for several centuries.

It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not pay with their own.

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays golf – it’s almost a law.

The past is but the past of a beginning.

Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.

I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.

Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.

Britain is the ideas factory of the world and has huge potential to benefit from the next technological revolution.

The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.

People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering.

Britain and the US remain the Wild West for ideas, where pioneers push each other towards ever greater heights in the white heat of free enterprise.

I always write about war, love, death, and injustice. There’s plenty of that around, so I never run out of ideas.

No, I love the idea that someone changes. As an actor it’s always the thing that you look for. He is someone who starts off bright, cheerful and confident and then has everything taken away from him. It’s a wonderful journey to take.

Nowadays Christians appear to treat prayer as a means to accomplish their aims and ideas. If they possessed just a little deeper understanding, they would recognize that prayer is but man uttering to God what is God’s will.

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.