A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

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

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

A picnic may well be a metaphor for life. The essentials for happiness are the right company, moderate if sanguine expectations and a reasonable standard of physical sustenance and comfort, the whole being bedeviled by the belief that there is always something better to be had if only one presses on.

Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.

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!