Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

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

If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.

The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!

I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.