Well, fancy giving money to the Government! Might as well have put it down the drain.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

Love is about giving, about caring for the other person's welfare. Love is treating someone, in the Kantian sense, never as a means but as an end in themselves. Love is sacrifice, love is something you work at, something you build like a house or tend like a plant, brick by brick, drop by drop, day by day. Nonsense. Old wives' tales, old husbands' tales. That is affection they are talking about, that is companionship, that is charity, that is tickets for the Cancer Research Ball. You must ask the young if you want to know what love is. Only they are deep enough in it to describe. We older ones have clues and simulacra, we base our judgement, like pathologists do, on the dents and scars and sediments of hearts long kept in formaldehyde. It is the pulsing heart you want to probe: the pulsing, beating, leaping, dipping, fluttering heart of a seventeen-year-old.

The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.

An act of God was defined as "something which no reasonable man could have expected.".

The Englishman never enjoys himself except for a noble purpose.