"Every day, thought Stone, is a revelation. At night it seems that you will never see it again, that it has been lost in the darkness. But with the sun, you hold your breath and look, and there it is. Just as it was; as you could never quite remember it."

"I have no particular political views but I was and am struck by the idea that the left and the right are always entirely similar when they become extreme - they click together like two edges of a magnet."

"An Oxford man walks down the street and thinks that he owns it, a Cambridge man walks down the street and doesn't give a toss who owns it."

"A journalist who has to borrow a typewriter is bad news."

"It was always the same in my experience, the greatest libertines make the most suspicious fathers, and show me a mother who would part her legs for a dray horse and you will find her daughter has a chastity belt before a christening mug. Why they deny their progeny what they find so pleasant themselves I will never conceive."

"The crowd pressed round the dais and the band broke into the national anthem. 'Broke into' was the wrong expression. They ransacked it. Stone closed his eyes and clenched his fists to stop himself laughing as the wailing brass savaged his eardrums."

"Men are always far more shocked by the vulgarities of women then women are by the vulgarities of men. It is one of the few monopolies which men consider should be theirs after the emancipation of women."

"Sex is good but poker lasts longer."

"She watched the lights upon the shore. The glare that was Plymouth in the distance. She thought, the dance is over. The girls are going out of the overheated hall into the cold air. They shiver; their young men hurry after them. Some have got home and find their dresses stained or torn; yet they've enjoyed themselves. Which is the more important? Wallflowers think of the young men who haven't danced with them; probably each has a dream-day hero. Remember the lieutenant to whom I never spoke a word; yet I married him and had children and grandchildren, though he never knew it. And there are others, madly happy, look in their mirrors and smile and wonder. Even the latest home has a warm bed to go to."

"The police case was very simple, because the robbers had been caught in the act of shifting the bullion; and as gold bars are more valuable than human lives, the robbers were given longer sentences than if they had been murderers."

"We were also misled by M. Michelin's use of the word "impracticable". "Impracticable," we argued with a careful exercise in semantics, leaves just a chance. More than that. As we thought about it, it seemed to give a broad hint that the road was passable to the young and the determined in sturdy motor cars. "Impracticable" — scratched paintwork, discomfort, difficult finding petrol stations, shortage of good restaurants — these it seemed were the sort of hazards the urbane Michelin was trying to convey to us. Alas, he was not."

"Hubert Ronson, as I was to discover later, is the sort of European you are always coming across in Africa. I never made up my mind whether such men leave Europe because their talents are unappreciated in the politer civilisations, or whether they develop them after they arrive. Bullies, thugs, warm-hearted layabouts, at heart they are all the same sentimental, anxious extroverts, with the same endless fund of dirty stories, and the same secret loathing and longing for the cultures they have escaped."

"He struggled to keep his temper. It struck him that both Marta and Chiara took advantage of him by attacking him with their ignorance, or call it innocence. A serious thinking adult had no defence against innocence because he was obliged to respect it, whereas the innocent scarcely knows what respect is, or seriousness either."

"The frame of mind, however, is everything. Given that, one can have a very satisfactory party all by oneself."

"Helping other people is a drug so dangerous that there is no cure, short of total abstention."

"There are dilettantes in human relationships just as there are, let's say, in politics."

"Across my life only one word will be written: "waste" - waste of love, waste of talent, waste of enterprise."

"The following evening John left with Lady Shorne for the south of France, without so much as a word to me. Alexa felt as if she were hearing that fateful cliche for the first time. "Without so much as a word." No matter how much she tried to see it from every point of view, its meaning was always clear. John was a coward. Anne was his victim. The roles were the opposite of what she had supposed. It was Anne who had been heroic, not John. John was a coward, a mere puppet into whom both Anne and Alexa had managed to breathe a semblance of life. He was as much the creation of one as of the other."

"In each human being there is an emergency exit: that is, the cult of self under a multitude of manifestations, which means that when an obsession becomes too violent, you can escape, vanish with a snicker."

"Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let's live, you and I, as none have ever lived before. - to Vita Sackville-West, October 25, 1918"

"You are my lover and I am your mistress and kingdoms and empires and governments have tottered and succumbed before now to that mighty combination."

"The secret of success in battle lies often not so much in the use of one's own strength but in the exploitation of the other side's weaknesses."

"You would always beat me; not so much because you are a better fighter as because you will not accept defeat."

"We had been friends. We could not become strangers. It left only one thing: we must be enemies."

"Before you have faith you must believe, and before you believe there must be evidence of some sort to persuade the mind. Faith is remembering that evidence and holding to it against all that seems to challenge or contradict it."

"Even if mankind had any desire to rid itself of the Seven Deadly Sins, Greed had been assured of a place in our hearts by virtue of time. By writing it down on a piece of paper and parading it as law and belief, Greed could be resurrected at a moment's notice. That was the beauty of the written word. It was invariably taken at face value and granted permit to be spoken as the truth. It lived longer than the man. And wreaked havoc in the process."

"The game of power is played remorselessly by men who have not the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, the way ordinary people live, and the ordinary people are too terrified to protest."

"A nation's wealth is too serious a matter to be left to the wealthy. The riches of a nation belong to all, to be shared among all for the general welfare."

"It is no more rational to have lawyers in positions of power than it would be to have garbage collectors in positions of power. And in human terms garbage collectors would be preferable."

"Where there had been hope, there was now hopelessness. Where there had been courage, there was now cynicism. Where there had been life, there was a living death. During Nixon's reign, much of life was transformed into a nightmare."

"In the Middle Ages the king offered protection to his subjects in return for their loyalty, and the subjects were doubly protected, for the church also sheltered them. The need for shelter - for a father image that cares and will hopefully provide and give some meaning to human lives - remains as real as it was in the Middle Ages, but modern technocracy has no place for either the father or the church and provides no substitute."

"It is almost a general rule that nations do not decline gradually. Instead they fall abruptly from their greatest heights."

"Uncorrupted man, with God's blessing, advances across the fields of the universe as though he were walking down a country lane."

"Throughout the history of Christianity, there had been a core of belief that man was not doomed to be everlastingly corrupt."

"Fragmentation occurs when a civilization is in decline."

"Long before the empire had reached its greatest extent, the Romans were bored by it."

"All is forgiven to kings and popes. History grants them immunity, even a full pardon, even when they admit their crimes and glory in them."

"Naked power has its limitations, since power is a generator of corruption and corruption in its turn tends to dilute the effectiveness of power."

"Historically the first philosopher to enquire deeply into the nature of corruption in society was Ibn Khaldun (1322-1406), whose wandering life was largely spent in the northern littoral of Africa at a time when kingdoms and sultanates were crumbling."

"The United States is dangerously close to being a plutocracy. A third of the private wealth is owned by less than 5 percent of the population."

"The corrupt man is nearly always rootless, deeply aware of his rootlessness."

"The corrupt, when found out, become especially good moralists."

"For domination has nothing whatsoever to do with good government, and power as an end in itself destroys good government."

"The second corruption of the state is oligarchy (oligos = few), in which the military elite is narrowed down to a few ruling families of immense wealth and prestige, who now openly flaunt their wealth and possessions."

"Nietzsche's accomplishment is that he permits us to see corruption from the inside."

"Corrupt men are always liars. Lies are their instruments, their pleasure, their solace. In time they come to believe their lies, or rather to half-believe them."

"At the heart of the mystery of corruption lies the desire of one man to impose his will on others to the largest possible extent."

"His worst crime was that he gave no hope to the young."

"A totalitarian dictatorship cannot explain; it can only suppress."