Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off.

Anyone who supposed that when Margaret Thatcher left Number Ten she was going to take a Trappist vow did not know that formidable politician.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

It behaves more like a tribe than a democratic institution...responding to custom rather than reason and using its own liturgy and language for the conduct of its domestic affairs.

It is curious that atheists have proved to be so intolerant of those who have a faith.

I think that what most surprises anybody who goes into politics from even a modestly cerebral background is the vulgarity of much of the cut and thrust of politics.

It is almost always wrong that the time isn't ripe to decide something. That is always said of difficult problems.