"Women are more powerful than they think. A mother’s warmth is the essence of motivation. If we could liquefy the encouragement, care and compassion we deliver to our children it would surely fill an expanse greater than the Pacific."

"With all the clever brains in America it would be great to see more investment and focus on this essential research!"

"Tribalism has become trendy."

"Global warming causing climate change may be the ultimate issue that unites us all."

"More than a billion women around the world want to emulate western women’s lifestyles and are rapidly acquiring the material ability to do so. It is therefore vital that in our leadership we display some reserve and responsibility in our spending so that the world’s finite resources will be available for our children, their children and their children’s children."

"Bullying behaviour can be communicated via text, mobile phones, internet, social networking sites, forums. But we can't limit it because these messages are then reinforced by television which glamorises yelling, swearing and vulgar behaviour as the way to walk the red carpet of acceptance."

"The style of kindness has changed."

"Everyone wants to be around her because she's always the one at the discos and at the centre of things."

"The factory workers say that it's impossible to do anything right. If you arrive five minutes early you are a saboteur; if you arrive five minutes late you are betraying socialism; if you arrive on time they say, "Where did you get the watch?""

"When old men decided to barter young men for pride and profit, the transaction was called war."

"...But love is like the measles; the later in life it affects you, the more severe the consequences" "Is there anything you can take for it?" "Only wedding vows"

"The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change."

"Progress is man's indifference to the lessons of history."

"Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Yes? Well socialism is exactly the reverse."

"I realized it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace-curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks."

"Makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea-party."

"Everybody thinks they'll never get married at your age. So did Jack, he told me. You think you can go on all your life being single, I remember he said, but you suddenly find out that you can't."

"Government wars aren't my wars; they've got nowt to do with me, because my own war's all that I'll ever be bothered about."

"Few writers who have managed to acquire his reputation can have been so much at the mercy of crude emotion."

"You can always rely on a society of equals taking it out on the women."

"Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not."

"Said Marx, "Don't be snobbish, we seek to abolish The 3rd class, not the 1st.""

"Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It's too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came And he pushed And they flew."

"I, Christopher Logue, was baptized the year Many thousands of Englishmen, Fists clenched, their bellies empty, Walked day and night on the capital city."

"One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog"…The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog.""

"To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell."

"I should say that happiness is being where one is and not wanting to be anywhere else."

"It's not the despair, Laura, I can stand the despair. It's the hope."

"If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself."

"The more you try to describe a dream the further it eludes your grasp, retreating before the advance of the words, growing cooler and cooler and paler and paler, until, when you have recorded it all, there is nothing of what it was really like left in your memory."

"Would you like to sin With Elinor Glyn On a tiger skin? Or would you prefer To err With her On some other fur?"

"He had that nameless charm, with a strong magnetism which can only be called "It", and cats – as well as women – always knew when he came into the room."

"To have "It", the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. He or she must be entirely unselfconscious and full of self-confidence, indifferent to the effect he or she is producing, and uninfluenced by others. There must be physical attraction, but beauty is unnecessary."

"Prudent readers will do well to hold Three Weeks at arm's length, unless they want to be cut by flying adjectives."

"And loveliest sight of all, in front of the fire, stretched at full length, was his tiger – and on him – also at full length – reclined the lady, garbed in some strange clinging garment of heavy purple crepe, its hem embroidered with gold, one white arm resting on the beast's head, her back supported by a pile of the velvet cushions, and a heap of rarely bound books at her side, while between her red lips was a rose not redder than they – an almost scarlet rose."

"No matter what he does, one always forgives him. It does not depend upon looks, either – although this actual person is abominably good-looking – it does not depend upon intelligence or character or – anything – as you say, it is just "it"."

"I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like It were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading Henry James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down."

"A madness of tender caressing seized her. She purred as a tiger might have done, while she undulated like a snake."

"Would you please publish the enclosed manuscript or return it without delay, as I have other irons in the fire."

"The better class of Briton likes to send his children away to school until they're old and intelligent enough to come home again. Then they're too old and intelligent to want to."

"It had always seemed to Louis that a fundamental desire to take postal courses was being sublimated by other people into sexual activity."

"I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world."

"With sociology one can do anything and call it work."

"I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar."

"Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it."

"My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely."

"Well," said Dr Jochum, "you are like all reformers. You like to reform the world because it is easier than trying to reform yourself."

"[A]nd the traffic noise that boomed in through the window was another reminder of what his spirit knew, that he was but a grain of sand in someone else's desert."