I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.
Cicero most reminds me of Harold Wilson. Both men knew how to keep the show on the road.
If you go back, ‘The Great Gatsby’ would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.
In a way I’m almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.
Everyone thinks politics will just go on the way it is. I don’t agree.
Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?
Egyptologists, skilled in piecing together the papyri of lost civilisations, suddenly discovered that the same talent could be applied to working out the pattern of German radio traffic.
You find out what you think by talking to yourself.
That young man seeks opportunities to test his principles as readily as a drunk picks fights in a bar.
It is perseverance, and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognized geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world.
Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men’s souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!
What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!
Another of Cicero’s maxims was that if you must do something unpopular, you might as well do it wholeheartedly, for in politics there is no credit to be won by timidity.
It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you’re forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.
Tape is the archiving champ and has been for decades. Reliable, less expensive than disks and available in large-scale robotic systems that store petabytes.
You can’t make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.
If long hitting is the thing that causes the spectators to whistle through their teeth in wonderment, why not play tournaments up and down an expansive stadium?
If you spend too long trying to avoid death, you will be dead in at least one way.
Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.
A police state is a country run by criminals.