I'm brash and abrasive but that's because I've noticed when people are nice and polite they never get anywhere.

If you know each other well, you want to do business with people you know well. You don't do business with strangers.

Membership of an organisation is good, as long as you can make yourself heard.

I'm a fundamentalist in the true sense. That is to say, I follow the fundamentals of religion... But for over 1,400 years people have been interpreting and re-interpreting the religion to suit their own purpose! ... These [extremist and terrorist acts] are not Islamic fundamentals any more than the Christians who burned people at the stake are fundamentalist. They are actually deviating from the teachings of the religion!

I know the situation of the Commonwealth generally, and I know that the aim should be to make the Commonwealth much more relevant to the poorer countries.

Once started, religious strife has a tendency to go on and on - to become permanent feuds. Today we see such intractable inter-religious wars in Northern Ireland, between Jews and Muslims and Christians in Palestine, Hindus and Muslims in South Asia and in many other places. Attempts to bring about peace have failed again and again. Always the extremist elements invoking past injustices, imagined or real, will succeed in torpedoing the peace efforts and bringing about another bout of hostility.

Some people say that we here have no freedom of religion, ... In reality, the people in that country are the ones who were forced to embrace a religion.