A faith is something you die for; a doctrine is something you kill for; there is all the difference in the world.

I try to operate on two unconnected levels. One on the practical level of action in which I am extremely cautious and conservative. The second is the realm of ideas where I try to be very free

It is not surprising that more and more people are coming to the conclusion that the ballot box is no longer an instrument that will secure political solutions... They can see that the parliamentary democracy we boast of is becoming a sham.

The people who have sacrificed their view in order to get to the top have very often left no footprints in the sands of time.

The one thing that unites Sunni, Shiites and Kurds is they want the Americans out.

There's people on the left who say, the ballot box is a waste of time. Forget them. When Mandela voted for the first time at the age of 76 there was a lot of grown men, including me, wept buckets. That was what it was about. It doesn't solve things, but it gives you the mechanism to hold to account the people with power.

I was radicalised by being a minister. That's when I saw how the system really worked. And that is not a very usual process, but it certainly happened to me: it gave me a lot more experience, it helped me to understand where power really lay, develop strategies for undermining or changing it, and so on. But that isn't the norm. Mr Gladstone moved to the left as he got older, and one or two other people have, but normally you swing the other way.