I'm highly political. I spend an awful lot of time in the U.S. trying to influence decision-makers. But I don't feel in tune with British politics.

I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.

Brian Eno

To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches.

Thomas Paine

When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.

David Cronenberg

A nation which expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, expects that which never was and never will be.

Thomas Jefferson

To make converts is the natural ambition of everyone.

Johann von Goethe

I would rather die an individual than live my life as a clone.

Cristina Marrero

I found out that colonels can stay until they drop dead or get a walker and being a critical medical specialty as an Army trained emergency room doctor, I could stay until age 67.

Gerald Griffin

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

W. H. Auden

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb

Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw The blind to hide the garden, where the moonEnjoys the open blossoms as they strawTheir beauty for his taking, boon for boon.And I do lift my aching arms to you,And I do lift my anguished, avid breast,And I do weep for very pain of you,And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence,

It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.

John Updike

Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes.

Miguel de Cervantes