A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.

We live in an age where the rate of change has been colossal. Colossal. Almost every week there's some transformation of some kind, whether technological or political or scientific, whatever. And I think it's bewildering to human beings to live in a time when they can't take anything as fixed - when everything is shifting and changing all the time.

The rate of change is global now. I think there's a kind of mind that is so ill at ease with that transformation that it reaches out for something permanent. And religious faith offers that, from simplicities, which you are told are eternal and unchanging, and you can hold on to those like a life raft in a metamorphosing world.

I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, 'soul.'

I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.