It's funny - there's nothing that stops you laughing like the sight of other people laughing about something else.

To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell.

When anyone says they often think something, it means they've just thought of it now.

For hundreds of pages the closely-reasoned arguments unroll, axioms and theorems interlock. And what remains with us in the end? A general sense that the world can be expressed in closely-reasoned arguments, in interlocking axioms and theorems.

Everything is as it was, I discover when I reach my destination, and everything has changed.

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

You can create a good impression on yourself by being right . . . but for creating a good impression on others there's nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong.