Old age makes caricatures of us all.

Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.

we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.

There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country.

Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.