We know how to think. We know how to laugh. We know we're going to die, which gives us a lot to think about, and we have a need for, what I would call, "the transcendent" or "the numinous" or even "the ecstatic" that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn't trust anyone who didn't respond to things of that sort.

I don't think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.

Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: 'Don't be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones. People might suppose this was in poor taste.

I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well. And getting a sense that the world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that the Empire was over.

When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.

The prince's official job description as king will be 'defender of the faith,' which currently means the state-financed absurdity of the Anglican Church, but he has more than once said publicly that he wants to be anointed as defender of all faiths—another indication of the amazing conceit he has developed in six decades of performing the only job allowed him by the hereditary principle: that of waiting for his mother to expire.

Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century.