Virtue is its own punishment.

No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it

How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.

No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets

The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do.

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.

The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.

We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land.

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Consider anything, only don’t cry!

Misery is the company of lawsuits.

The hypocrite looks for faults; the believer looks for excuses.

The Navy is much more than a job; much more than service to country. It is a way of life. It gets in your blood.

Kids can handle a lot more than you think they can. It's when they get to be grown up that you have to start worrying.

Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.

It was a palace, made entirely of gold, sitting on an island of silver snow at the very top of the world. East of the sun, and west of the moon.

Thank God for the theater.

I haven't heard anything about a reunion show for Sisters. But if the script was good I would do it.

I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.