An eclectic collection that made us pause for thought.
Dialogue is the strategy of the brave.
Sushi must have been created by two Jews thinking, ‘How can we open a restaurant without a kitchen?’
Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.
Madness is a relative state. Who can say which of us is truly insane?
In victory, you deserve champagne, in defeat you need it.
The enduring metaphor of regulatory policy is the noise of stable doors being firmly shut behind the horse.
When the white missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land.
They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Kill one man and you’re a murderer, kill a million and you’re a conqueror.
Passengers are reminded that they are here to wait for the train. The train is not here to wait for them.
Wine is sunlight, held together by water.
If you don’t marry me I’ll become a priest.
My dream is to rebuild Iraq but our dreams have been postponed.
Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.
Trust is a casualty of modern society.
There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
We have a democracy but it’s dysfunctional. The structure is such that the pressure is on the MP to conform with the Party, rather than hold Government to account on behalf of his constituents.
There is a very deep sense that people don’t like the remoteness of our politics. Somehow the bridge between people and power needs to be bridged.
Heathrow is the noisiest airport in Europe because of the number of people living under its flight paths!
I am equal to anyone but superior to no-one.
We must avoid arrogance. Vanity leads to mistakes.
There’s no point in being an economist if you can’t manipulate statistics.
Stay ahead of the avant garde.
Just for the record, I’m not in favour of sin.
Definition of the monarchy:
The light above politics.
It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds.
She [Tracey Emin] is the Sarah Palin of the art world.
Democracy is a like bus, we will get off when we get to our destination.
Science is the poetry of reality.
Everything has to be acted to be real.
If a God has made this world, then I would not like to be the God; it’s misery and distress would break my heart.
You’ll never have a good art career unless your work fits into the elevator of a New York apartment block.
It is a very long cultural decline from Lord Reith to the current Reith lectures: all the way from robust health to decadent triviality.
Watching the prime minister trying to run the country is like watching Edward Scissorhands trying to make balloon animals.
To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see.
Physically I’m a chicken. Mentally, I’m bold.
Fear is a far more dominant force in human behaviour than euphoria.
Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.
The English don’t understand music, but they love the noise it makes.
If it weren’t for electricity, we’d all be watching television by candlelight.
Limitless growth is the fantasy of economists, businesses and politicians.
When I was sitting there at the Fed, I would say “Does anyone know what is going on?” ….. I couldn’t tell what was really happening.
Music makes people less obsessed with consumerism because a performance is not a consumable or ownable. It’s not a commodity.
Spare me your sermons and I will fix your sewers.
I don’t spend my days fussing about even large sums of money. It’s not that I’m rich, it’s just that I’d rather not look at a piece of paper with money written on it. It’s not what I do.
“What is the penalty for bigamy?”
“Two wives.”
We pretend we’re run by people. We’re not run by anybody. The secret of modern Britain is that there is no power anywhere.
Real concern for the future is always more persuasive in those who have a genuine feeling for the past.
The curious phenomenon is that contemporary art is descended from the avant-garde but has taken something that was a radical, complex gesture and made it popular and simple, so it misrepresents modernism’s tradition.
Definition of Peace in modern times:
Peace is merely the interval while everyone is reloading.