Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure.

I now accept that it is looking increasingly likely that Tiger Woods is, in fact, straight.

Mankind can live free in a society hemmed in by laws, but we have yet to find a historical example of mankind living free in lawless anarchy.

When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.

If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

All the big words -virtue, justice, truth, ...- are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness

Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.