"A barrister's job is to put the case for the defence as effectively and clearly as would his client if he had an advocate's skills. The barrister's belief or disbelief in the truth of this story is irrelevant: it's for the jury to decide this often difficult question."

"Beliefs about how you live your life, matters of private decision, views best kept for private enjoyment, prejudice or entertainment, can't be imposed by the operation of criminal law. Attempts to enforce such views can only make the government the subject of ridicule."

"People will go to endless trouble to divorce one person and then marry someone who is exactly the same, except probably a bit poorer and a bit nastier. I don't think anybody learns anything."

"I found criminal clients easy and matrimonial clients hard. Matrimonial clients hate each other so much and use their children to hurt each other in beastly ways. Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they're usually quite peaceful and agreeable."

"The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt."

"I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print."

"Do we want blanks, asterisks and exclamation marks which people can fill in with their own imaginations, or are we prepared and strong enough to tolerate, even if we do not approve, the strong Anglo-Saxon, realistic and vivid language?"

"No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails."

"There comes a time in every man's life when he must make way for an older man."

"The Conservative Party has one overriding concern in foreign policy, and that is the growth of Communist power and influence in the world, and the dangers it can bring for all of us."

"Sorry, old cock, to leave it in this shape."

"For God's sake, bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country."

"His writings, like his actions, were faulty, violent, a little morbid even, and abnormal. He was not, and did not attempt to be, an average man. But actions and writings alike, in their strangeness and aloofness, were unadulterated by a tinge of affectation."

"I have heard it said, by the way, that Donne's intolerable defect of ear grew out of his own baptismal name, when harnessed to his own surname -- John Donne. No man, it was said, who had listened to this hideous jingle from childish years, could fail to have his genius for discord, and the abominable in sound, improved to the utmost."

"To read Dryden, Pope, &c., you need only count syllables; but to read Donne you must measure time, and discover the time of each word by the sense of passion."

"He was the Word, that spake it: He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it, I do believe and take it."

"When God's hand is bent to strike, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God; but to fall out of the hands of the living God is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination."

"Poor intricated soul! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthian soul!"

"And what is so intricate, so entangling as death? Who ever got out of a winding sheet?"

"I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door."

"Now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons."

"What gnashing is not a comfort, what gnawing of the worm is not a tickling, what torment is not a marriage bed to this damnation, to be secluded eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God?"

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

"How deep do we dig, and for how coarse gold?"

"He drinks misery, and he tastes happiness; he mows misery, and he gleaned happiness; he journeys in misery, he does but walked in happiness."

"The flea, though he kill none, he does all the harm he can."

"I do nothing upon myself, and yet am mine own executioner."

"Let not one bring Learning, another Diligence, another Religion, but every one bring all."

"Age is a sickness, and Youth is an ambush."

"I know not what fear is, nor I know not what it is that I fear now; I fear not the hastening of my death, and yet I do fear the increase of the disease... my weakness is from nature, who hath but her measure, my strength is from God, who possesses and distributes infinitely."

"A man that is not afraid of a Lion is afraid of a Cat; not afraid of starving, and yet is afraid of some joint of meat at the table, presented to feed him; not afraid of the sound of drums, and trumpets, and shot, and those, which they seek to drown, the last cries of men, and is afraid of some particular harmonious instrument; so much afraid, as that with any of these the enemy might drive this man, otherwise valiant enough, out of the field."

"Donne, more than any other of his lifetime, understood that flair is its own kind of truth: if you want to make your point, make it so vivid and strange that it cuts straight throughyour interlocutor's complacent attention. To read his verse is to hear him insist, across the gap of hundreds of years: for God's sake, will you listen."

"think: poems fixed this landscape: Blake, Donne, Keats"

"Donne is the most inharmonious of our versifiers, if he can be said to have deserved such a name by lines too rugged to seem metre. Of his earlier poems many are very licentious; the later are chiefly devout. Few are good for much; the conceits have not even the merit of being intelligible; it would perhaps be difficult to select three passages that we should care to read again."

"Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright."

"The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts Not of two lovers, but two loves the nests."

"Who ever loves, if he do not propose The right true end of love, he's one that goes To sea for nothing but to make him sick."

"The heavens rejoice in motion, why should I Abjure my so much loved variety."

"No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace, As I have seen in one autumnal face."

"She, and comparisons are odious."

"Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to love."

"Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies."

"Absence, hear thou my protestation Against thy strength, Distance, and length; Do what thou canst for alteration"

"When my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly upon me, when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equal to princes, for they shall be equal but in dust."

"Whilst my physicians by their love are grown Cosmographers, and their map, who lie Flat on this bed."

"Since I am coming to that holy room, Where, with thy choir of saints forevermore, I shall be made thy music; as I come I tune the instrument here at the door, And what I must do then, think here before."

"We understood Her by her sight; her pure, and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say, her body thought."

"And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit, Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, Father, Son, are things forgot."

"Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls; For, thus friends absent speak."