Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.

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.

Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.

If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.

Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.

If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.