If a decision-making process is flawed and dysfunctional, decisions will go awry.
Next to courage, willpower is the most important thing in politics.
I very much wanted to be editor of the 'New Statesman!' But I never wanted to be prime minister, except maybe as a little boy.
If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped.
The most intimidating world leader was Lyndon Johnson, who became U. S. President when John Kennedy was assassinated. He exulted in this power and liked to inspire fear.
I was very fond of Princess Diana. She used to have me over to lunch to ask my advice. I'd give her good advice, and she'd say: 'I entirely agree. Paul, you're so right. ' Then she'd go and do the opposite.
The word 'meaningful' when used today is nearly always meaningless.
I guess in society there's no place for women in their older thirties. We're supposed to go sit on a shelf at some point. . . and wait.
If you lose, it hurts, but as long as you have fought hard, you can still feel good about yourself.
But I didn't frame it; I put into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her. There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulders. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.
But anyone who has been that young knows that the great grief of love is that your body feels the most when it knows the least.