We cannot hope for a society in which formal organized religion dies out. But we can stop behaving as if it was worthy of our collective respect.

It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.

I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.

It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.

This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists.