Of all political sacred-cows, education is the most sacred and the most cow-like.

Values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed.

History is littered with the wars which everybody knew would never happen.

I am the last person whom it would be reasonable to expect to leave the Conservative Party.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

Lift the curtain and 'the State' reveals itself as a little group of fallible men in Whitehall, making guesses about the future, influenced by political prejudices and partisan prejudices, and working on projections drawn from the past by a staff of economists.