The dividing line between wish and need was never clear.

One of the admirable features of British novelists is that they have no scruple about setting their stories in foreign settings with wholly foreign personnel.

Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.

Any new financial order for the world must tackle the three chief challenges of our age.

Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka.

Profits in business always depend on the rate of interest: the higher the interest, the higher the rate of profit required.

The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags.