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Almost any bunkum has some partial validity, and we regularly read into the confusing mess what we want to see.

There is a fine line between public expressions of faith and aggressive declarations thereof, and religious tolerance is inversely proportional to the latter.

Gullible citizens are a demagogue’s dream.

You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values, if you are to have any inkling of it. You may not like what you see, but do not on that account fall into the error of trying to adjust it to suit your own vision of what it ought to have been.

I must emphasise that at private soldier level you frequently have no idea where you are, or precisely how you got there, let alone why.

Even the most superficial of a newspaper reveals an important aspect of human psychology: our preoccupation with the short term.

The fashion pages have always puzzled me. In my smugly ignorant view, the articles appear to be so full of fluff and nonsense as to make the astrology columns seem insightful by comparison.

When the law’s on your side, pound the law. When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. And when neither is on your side, pound the table.

There are few sounds as menacing as a bayonet being fixed.

There are, of course, innumerable abuses, countless possible misinterpretations, and depressingly many biased studies, but, done right, the process works; it yields knowledge.

In general, any differences between two groups will always be greatly accentuated at the extremes.

Our two most basic political ideals—liberty and equality—are, in their purest forms, incompatible. Complete liberty results in inequality, and mandatory equality leads to a loss of liberty.