I think if journalists were responsible for international policy we'd have a nuclear war every week.

I think if you do have democracy it would transform the world because if the millions of people who die live on a dollar a day, had the vote, they would redistribute the wealth of the world, and the people at the top are not prepared to see that happen.

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

The flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen.

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.

I really think in the Commonwealth of Europe you should have Russia. I listed a hundred countries that would be in it and it would then be a really European United Nations.

I met somebody once who said, "I'm a lapsed-atheist" by what he meant was, "I don't believe in God but the older I get the more I realise there is a spirituality in everybody that has to be cherished and nourished." That made a lot of sense to me.