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!

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

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.

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.

It's easy to get a reputation for wisdom. It's only necessary to live long, speak little and do less.

We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving.

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.