I guess my claustrophobia is incurable - feeling, as I tend to, ill at ease in any closed room, and always tempted to find out what is on the other side of the door.

You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest

Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.

Unlike 'real relationships', 'virtual relationships' are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff.

Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.

For one to be free there must be at least two.

You are a stranger, I am a stranger, we all remain strangers, and nevertheless we can like or even love each other.

The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.

We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.

The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

The value of other people is that they have something unique to offer.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

A friend is a bird who can understand you and sing along with you even when you lose your voice.

So long as the global economy continues to recover, that remains Obama's No. 1 claim to successful leadership. Nothing else even comes close.

My free-kick secret? I just look at the net and say take the kick, Cristiano.

There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.

We often talk to ourselves in ways that we would never let a stranger or even a friend talk to us.

Sometime to be called Pavarotti is not always an advantage.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

In general those parents have the most reverence who most deserve it; for he that lives well cannot be despised.

I say, without characters, fame lives long.