Those who are made can be unmade.

So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

I believe this was [Margaret Thatcher] estimate of the voter: "These people are so stupid that they will vote for me because they think I know how to run the household."

One of the ideals [Margaret Thatcher] grew up with was self-denial and postponement of gratification, and yet she went about to create a greedy, short-term society. It is a paradox.

Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.

What [Margaret Thatcher] made a play for was the acquisitive: our greedy nature. She set aside other things like an identification with community, altruism. The only collective that she understood was: Rally around and slay the enemy.

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.