When a woman cries date rape what she means is the whole thing went too quickly.

Like every other viable environmental policy, the search for clean energy begins at home.

What makes a politician accountable is not that there are millions of people who vote, but that there are procedures of government that force him to account for himself.

My own view is that left-wing positions largely come about from resentment - I agree with Nietzsche about this - a resentment about the surrounding social order. They have privileges, I don't. Or, I have them and I can't live up to them.

Politics is a matter of day-to-day improvisation, and it often seems as though the major parties are guided only by the desire to stay in office and not by any philosophy that might justify their doing so.

The conservative is the one who understands his own society from within and loves and defends it.

Of course, it is the case that conservatism as I envisage it distances itself always from abstract conceptions and tries to find the concrete reality.

We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking.

The traditional family has an intrinsic as well as an instrumental value, and that is the real reason so many conservatives defend it.

We should make the case for the things we love, even if we think that people will misunderstand them. That is why people defend the U.S. Constitution, even though so few really understand the subtle thinking embodied in that document.

In art it is always as though the question is what the work of art is really about.

There are big questions science doesn't answer, such as why is there something rather than nothing? There can't be a scientific answer to that because it's the answer that precedes science.

Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.

In mathematics and science we solve our problems as well as create them. But in art and philosophy things are not so simple.

A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people.

To people like me, educated in post-war Britain, free speech has been a firm premise of the British way of life.

My father was a man of principle who found his principles confirmed in the unremitting failure which they brought on him.

Under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, it is an offence to stir up hatred towards religious and racial groups. 'Stirring up hatred' is an expression both loaded and undefined. Do I stir up hatred towards a religious group by criticising its beliefs in outspoken terms?

18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.

Certainly the multicultural activists in the Labour party and the universities wanted to destroy the old white Anglo-Saxon education system as they saw it, and produce something completely different - with no conception of what that completely different thing would be, of course.

All political order presupposes a pre-political order, a sense that people belong together. And then, of course, they might seek a contract that embodies their togetherness. But the togetherness has to be there.

The main aim of conservative politicians is to get through to the next election without being noticed. Nothing is more embarrassing to them than a person who claims not only to share their beliefs but also to be inclined to put them into practice.

I've never been an optimist, but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised.

One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?