A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.

[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.

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.