"There is an emerging scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes more intense and more destructive. It turns out that Katrina fits into a pattern that scientists and greens have been trying to warn us about for a long time."

"We are entering a world of rapidly multiplying nuclear stand-offs like this. India vs Pakistan. Iran vs Israel. America vs. China. Within decades, North Korea vs Japan and South Korea. Not one Cold War, but many - and the risk is doubled each time."

"The climate-change deniers are rapidly ending up with as much intellectual credibility as creationists and Flat Earthers... They are denying the reality of a force that — unless we change the way we live pretty fast — will kill millions."

"The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War."

"There’s one key fact, he said, that every human being needs to understand– and everything else he was going to explain flows from that. ‘Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts’ in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. ‘We’re very, very single- minded.’"

"Oddly, the person I feel sorriest for isn't Brand himself – although he certainly comes across as a rather pitiable figure, projecting his own brokenness on to the world around him – but Johann Hari. Drummed out of Fleet Street for plagiarism, the former Independent columnist has washed up as "my mate Johann, who's been doing research for this book". For a genuinely talented polemicist, it would have been a humbling experience to have to treat this sub-undergraduate dross as the scintillating wisdom of a philosopher-king."

"At the moment false claims spread on social media far faster than the truth, because of the algorithms that spread outraging material faster and further."

"around one in five car accidents is now due to a distracted driver."

"So if you check your texts often while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts– you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterwards, which can be much longer."

"Do not try to make the brilliant pupil a replica of yourself."

"Rome grew powerful through her military and political genius; and then, from Greece, she learnt to live the life of the mind. We have grown powerful through our scientific and industrial genius. The only way in which we can justify that power, use it for our own lasting benefit, and contribute something permanent to the development of the human race, is to understand and spread a system of noble spiritual ideals. Some of these we ourselves are working out. Many others we derive from Christianity. And many—in art and philosophy and literature—we have received from Greco-Roman civilization, as a priceless legacy. The real duty of man is not to extend his power or multiply his wealth beyond his needs, but to enrich and enjoy his only imperishable possession: his soul."

"Nobody has ever thought himself to death. The chief danger confronting us is not age. It is laziness, sloth, routine, stupidity, — forcing their way in like wind through the shutters, seeping into the cellar like swamp water."

"These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice, as inaudible as the streams of sound conveyed by electric waves beyond the range of our hearing; and just as the touch of button on our stereo will fill the room with music, so by opening one of these volumes, one can call into range a voice far distant in time and space, and hear it speaking, mind to mind, heart to heart."

"The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning."

"The aim of those who try to control thought is always the same. They find one single explanation of the world, one system of thought and action that will (they believe) cover everything; and then they try to impose that on all thinking people."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"What do I say to them in the dressing-room? Nothing really. Most of the time I don't even know what they are going to do myself."

"Of all the players I have played alongside, managed and coached in more than 40 years at Anfield, he is the most talented."

"His genius is not only in his own ability but in making others play"

"I would just love to have gone and stood in the Kop."

"The people who come to watch us play, who love the team and regard it as part of their lives, would never appreciate Liverpool having a huge balance in the bank. They want every asset we possess to be wearing a red shirt."

"Management is a seven-days-a-week job. The Intensity of it takes it toll on your health. Some people want to go on for ever, and I obviously don't."

"Life is a waste of time. Time is a waste of life. Get wasted all the time and you'll have the time of your life."

"I'm a huge filmstar... but you have to hurry to the movies, because I usually die in the first fifteen fucking minutes. I'm the only guy I know who died in a fucking Muppet movie."

"Recently, I turned 60... and even more recently, I turned 62. That was a bastard, I don't even remember the 61."

"Aromatherapy bollox!"

"People die all the time. It's just that you're not around."

"I came here on Concorde today... and I arrived before I fucking left!"

"That man (Ronald Reagan, who was President of the USA at the time), he sits at that desk in the White House, and the button is there that can end the world: BOOM! My father's younger than him and we don't give him the controls for the television!"

"Life for me is great. I'm a very f***in' wealthy person, I'm married to a very beautiful woman and I get laid with monotonous regularity."

"When people say "it's always the last place you look". Of course it is. Why would you keep looking after you've found it?"

"There are two seasons in Scotland: June and Winter."

"The great thing about Glasgow is that if there's a nuclear attack it'll look exactly the same afterwards."

"The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever being one."

"Never trust anybody with only one book."

"My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger."

"Life is supposed to be fun. It's not a job or occupation. We're here only once and we should have a bit of a laugh."

"I think age is terribly overrated. You're okay as long as you don't grow up. By all means grow old, but don't mature. Remain childlike, retain wonder, the ability to be flabbergasted by something."

"For years I thought the club's name was Partick Thistle Nil."

"Don't buy one of those baby intercoms. Babies pretend to be dead. They're bastards, and they do it on purpose."

"Scotland has the only football team in the world that does a lap of disgrace."

"I hate all those weathermen, too, who tell you that rain is bad weather. There's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing, so get yourself a sexy raincoat and live a little."

"It's pish!"

"Poos himself on stage, classic Billy"

"We all know that at 5 in the morning the lanes behind hotels are full of children, especially wee blind ones who can't see fucking trucks coming."

"[Singing] "Oh, the big fire engine goes ding-a-ling-a-ling." No, it fucking doesn't. It used to."

"You said, "If you're ever in Los Angeles we must have dinner"- well, he's here. That's not an invitation! Translated, it means: "You're a boring piece of shit, I'm off, I've had enough of you!""

"[to the front of audience] What was I talking about? Can you remember, eh? What? [to audience at the back] Shut the fuck up, I'm talking to someone! [to front again] Button your cardigan, I can see your cleavage."

"My wife said "I want to sell the house and buy a yacht". I said "What?! You do realise I live here? Comedian, Scottish guy. There's 3 kids over there, each have their own rooms. C'mon, I'll show you, they live here too.""

"Who the fuck are you? Get out of my house...and take that fucking bulldozer with you."