I'm sometimes impatient with young people who demonstrate at my meetings and who don't want an argument, but who just want to go on television as having been there and made a fuss. This doesn't mean I don't believe in participatory democracy.

I was too busy doing my job and living my life to spend time keeping notes for some future volume of memoirs.

The essential ingredient of politics is timing.

Who is it that said that 'you have not converted a man because you have silenced him?' This is true of the use of the military on people.

I know the usual answer of Christ using violence to get the sellers out of the temple, but to me this was impatience rather than violence.

I'm impatient not with the House of Commons as an institution, but with the way in which it is operated. This doesn't prove I don't believe in participatory democracy.

I was shaken to the extent that people who criticized me used to say that I was Protestant more than a Catholic because I like to impose constraints on myself, but I don't like them to be imposed from the outside.