A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest. I think that kind of thing is an abuse of history.

I do think that the legacy of the Norman conquest is still strong in Britain. Our hereditary monarchy, our established church, our ancient county structures, though hollowed out in many ways, are a direct result of what happened in 1066.

Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon.

"Romanticizing the past" is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.

Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into. That looks like a magical thinking to me, but we don't really have a better idea.

We like to think that the fate of the Earth and the fate of human worlds are the same thing, but we're not as important as that.

The world we are in today is likely to end catastrophically, as many other human worlds have done before.