Hope is the fuel of progress and fear is the prison in which you put yourself.

If you file your waste-paper basket for fifty years, you have a public library.

Making mistakes is how you learn.

Christians believe that God created man, and humanists believe that man invented God. But whichever way you look at it, we're brothers and sisters. Either we're brothers and sisters because we're children of God, or because we've banded together to invent God. So the ethics of the humanist and the ethics of some Christians are very similar. And we don't want to create divisions between humanists and Liberation Theologians, any more than we want between the New Worker and the Trots. It's not helpful.

It is tempting to deny, but if you deny you confirm what you won't deny.

I've got four lovely children, ten lovely grandchildren, and I left parliament to devote more time to politics, and I think that what is really going on in Britain is a growing sense of alienation. People don't feel anyone listens to them.

When I think of Cool Britannia I think of old people dying of hypothermia.