The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.

Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.

It is silly to call fat people "gravitationally challenged", a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.

You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.