The institution of marriage, if you look at it over many centuries, has come and gone.

Change the way you think, and you are halfway to changing the world.

I think the hero in our generation is not the individual but the pair, two people who together add up to more than they are apart.

The British have turned their sense of humour into a national virtue. It is odd, because through much of history, humour has been considered cheap, and laughter something for the lower orders. But British aristocrats didn't care a damn about what people thought of them, so they made humour acceptable.

The kind of conversation I like is one in which you are prepared to emerge a slightly different person.

Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.

Never before have humans been so ambitious, have they thought that they could be much more than their parents were.