The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.
If you file your waste-paper basket for fifty years, you have a public library.
If one meets a powerful person - Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates - ask them five questions: 'What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?' If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.
I don't believe in the hereditary principle in the House of Lords. Imagine going to the dentist, sitting in the chair and he says, 'I'm not a dentist myself, but my father was a dentist and his father before him. Now, open wide!
Well, it all began with Democracy. Before we had the vote all the power was in the hands of rich people. If you had money you could get health care, education, look after yourself when you were old, and what democracy did was to give the poor the vote and it moved power from the marketplace to the polling station, from the wallet. . . to the ballot.
Encouragement is the most important thing in the world for young people, rather than league tables, which demoralise everyone.
Hope is the fuel of progress and fear is the prison in which you put yourself.
The [Sarah ]Palin endorsement as sort of vouching for Donald Trump is all about. She is the sort of tribune of not conservatism as ideology.
I have not hated the man, but his faults.
Creativity is not enough. . . the skill of the true artist is to show the real in the light of the ideal and so transfigure it.
A religion that costs nothing is worth nothing. A cheap Christianity, without a cross, will prove in the end a useless Christianity, without a crown.