It is scarcely a mark of intellectual profundity to have noticed that our society is big.

No, I don't think I've ever really favoured English independence. My view is that if the Scots want to be independent then we should aim for the same thing.

My main argument is that environmental destruction comes when people externalise their costs and pass them on to future generations. That is obviously something that large enterprises do and they become large by doing it.

Environmental degradation has one cause above all others: the propensity of human beings to take the benefit and leave the costs to someone else, preferably someone far away in space or time, whose protests can be safely ignored.

Buildings like Penn Station attract our protective instincts not only because of their beauty but because we fear what will come to replace them.

The rude, raw, 'let it all hang out' freedom of the Californian hippies was in fact the most censorious and oppressive of societies that I have encountered.

My 2018 ended with a hate storm, in response to my appointment as chair of the government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

My life divides into three parts. In the first I was wretched; in the second ill at ease; in the third hunting.

A lot of the Qur'an is, frankly, cantankerous, vitriolic, man-hating stuff.

One must recognise what all religious people know, which is that human beings are imperfect and fallen and there's no way in which they alone can surmount the problems which they create.

What the word conservative means is not putting things back but conserving them. There are things that are threatened and you love them, so you want to keep them.

I've always taken the view that works of art are not just things that we enjoy. They can convey truths about the world more vividly and to greater effect than ordinary philosophical prose can because they don't just deal in ideas but show the emotional reality of them.

When I say there is no such crime as date rape I am saying what is true. There isn't a specific legal category of date rape and I wanted to make that point in order to ensure that people don't use this to obscure the difference between real sexual violence and, you know, things that have gone wrong.

There has been throughout this country and throughout Europe really an attempt silence the conservative voice. We get identified, caricatured and then demonised and made to look as though we are some kind of sinister, fascist, racist kind of people.

Lives are destroyed by many things. They are destroyed by anti-racism too, as Ray Honeyford's was.

I've always loved horses.

On the whole, I rather disapprove of cookbooks, except for the literary ones, like Elizabeth David's.

If you're going to have a free economy, one in which the ordinary citizen can dispose of his own income, you're going to have people who dispose of it in an anti-social way.

I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone's point of view, that doesn't seem particularly intolerable to me.

Life at home wasn't very good and I had really left by the time I was 16 and didn't go back until after Cambridge when I went to look after my mother when she was dying.

My little book of stories, 'Souls in the Twiligh,' may have to stand in for all the other things I have wanted to write in my retirement.

I've spent my life arguing for greater respect between men and women and anyone who takes the time to read my books or listen to my lectures will realise this.

I am hostile to the idea that collective solutions have to be made by committees and then imposed top-down. I very much prefer bottom-up solutions.

Look at what left-wing movements were like in the 19th century - they were all about progress, the engineering of the world, the reshaping of nature, and so on. It's only postwar, really, that people on the left have come to see the environment as a critical issue.

The real cure to immigration, obviously, is to make sure that there is prosperity around the world so that people don't have the motive. Not just prosperity, but freedom.

America has this wonderful ability to recover from its own mistakes, which is why it's so hugely superior to China.

Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls.

Conservatism is about freedom, yes. But it is also about the institutions and attitudes that shape the responsible citizen, and ensure that freedom is a benefit to us all. Conservatism is therefore also about the limits to freedom.

Anyone can lie. One need only have the requisite intention - in other words, to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included.

The Marxist theory of ideology is extremely contentious, not least because it is tied to socio-economic hypotheses that are no longer believable.

The world of art, I have suggested, is full of fakes. Fake originality, fake emotion and the fake expertise of the critics - these are all around us and in such abundance that we hardly know where to look for the real thing. Or perhaps there is no real thing?

Perhaps the world of art is just one vast pretence, in which we all take part since, after all, there is no real cost to it, except to those like Charles Saatchi, rich enough to splash out on junk?

You cannot own a symphony or a novel in the way you can own a Damien Hirst. As a result there are far fewer fake symphonies or fake novels than there are fake works of visual art.

For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.

The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.

Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

The true face of religion belongs to the re-enchantment of our injured civilization; faith is a way of filling all the spiritual spaces in our damaged world with the vision of a loving God, the God described in the Qur'an as al-Rahman al-Rahim.

Conservatism, for me, is the philosophy and the politics of attachment.

Conservatives hold on to things not only because they are attached to them, but also because they do not see the sense in radical change, until someone has told them what it will lead to.

If, as many people believe, there is a God, and that God made us in his own image, then of course we are distinct from nature, just as He is.

Whether it is a garden gnome, the sound of Bing Crosby launching into 'White Christmas', the blinking innocent eyes of Bambi or the words of Patience Strong, the kitsch phenomenon is there as strong and recognisable as your mother's face. You seldom if ever have the question, whether this is kitsch or not. If you think it might be, then it is.

A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.

Given the right to - given the opportunity to vote, I voted for Brexit because I've never approved really of the European Union, I never approved of it because of its attempts to confiscate national sovereignty in all the issues that matter.

For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways.

Although homosexuality has been normalised, it is not normal.

Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.

Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers.

Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.

I am a conservative thinker, well known as such, outspoken as such but reasonable in my view.

But the European Union does not have a concept of national identity. It was set up to abolish that idea, not to abolish German national identity because that was trying to save itself.