In England, we have a curious institution called the Church of England. Its strength has always been in the fact that on any moral or political issue it can produce such a wide divergence of opinion that nobody -- from the Pope to Mao Tse-tung -- can say with any confidence that he is not an Anglican. Its weaknesses are that nobody pays much attention to it and very few people attend its functions.

The main objection to killing people as a punishment...is that killing people is wrong

Better to go than sit around being a terrible old bore.

Politics, as I never tire of saying, is for social and emotional misfits, handicapped folk, those with a grudge. The purpose of politics is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power.

Judicial execution can never cancel or remove the atrocity it seeks to punish; it can only add a second atrocity to the original one ... So long as one sees killing as wrong there is no need to waste time with the deterrent argument, since it would be nonsense to try to prevent a theoretical evil in the future by perpetrating an actual one in the present.

You should tell the truth as often as you can, but in such a way as people don't believe you or think that you're being funny.

Politicians can forgive almost anything in the way of abuse; they can forgive subversion, revolution, being contradicted, exposed as liars, even ridiculed, but they can never forgive being ignored.