I'm not one of those who thinks there is something inherently bad or inferior about watching television.

I can't imagine a God who would ever need to intercede in the daily travails of my life.

I'm a very happy, content member of David Cameron's team. I fought very hard to get my friend elected as leader of the Conservative party, then elected as the prime minister of this country, and I'm very happy being part of that team that is bringing change to this country.

There were some who wanted all the benefits of E.U. membership without any of the costs. I'm not sure that's very realistic.

Did I want Britain to remain in the E.U.? Yes. Did I fear the consequences if we quit? Yes. Did I argue passionately for that during the referendum? Absolutely I did.

Britain can choose, as others are, short term fixes and more stimulus. Or we can lead the world with long-term solutions to long-term problems.

Many retailers have complained bitterly to me about the complexity of the Carbon Reduction Commitment. It's not a commitment; it's a tax.

The wish to pass something on to your children is about the most basic, human and natural aspiration there is.

It was the Conservatives who first protected people in the mills.

Sound public finances are not the enemy of sustained growth - they are its precondition.

To simply argue that public spending must always go up and never be cut is irresponsible.

Frankly, people buying a home to let should not be squeezing out families who can't afford a home to buy.

It's difficult to see how Syria can have any long-term future with Assad there as president. Many people would never return to that country if that were the case.

If we leave the European Union, there will be an immediate economic shock that will hit financial markets. People will not know what the future looks like.

Brexit is for the richest in our country: they can afford recessions.

We are not quitters. Britain has always gone out there; we have probably been more influential than any other country in shaping our world and the way it has thought about itself, the way we interact as nations.

If the country's poorer, it's got less money.

I serve at the discretion of the prime minister.

I do not want Britain to turn its back on Europe or the rest of the world.

We must bring unity of spirit and purpose and condemn hatred and division wherever we see it.

I fought passionately to remain in the E.U., and I warned of the economic risks if we left the E.U.

Leaving the E.U. was not the outcome that I wanted or campaigned, but now that democracy has spoken, we must act on that result. I will fully respect that result.

There is lots of evidence that it is this fear of going into debt that most puts people from poorer backgrounds off going to university.

The former pension minister, the Liberal Democrat Steve Webb said I was trying to abolish the lump sum. Instead, we are going to keep the lump sum and abolish the Liberal Democrats.

Working people of this country want economic security. The worst possible thing you can do for those families is bust the public finances, have some welfare system this country can't afford.

To all companies large and small, I would say this: the British economy is fundamentally strong; we are highly competitive, and we are open for business.

Britain is an open and tolerant country, and I will fight with everything I have to keep it so.

We need strength and success elsewhere in our country - not by pulling London down but by building the rest of the country up.

The Conservative party absolutely must not allow itself to be shut out of parts of the north of England.

I've always thought that good politics follows from good economics and good policies.

I think people who sit around and are always yearning for the next thing are not always the happiest people.

Margaret Thatcher's government redistributed money from rich to poor. And that's the nature of a modern western democracy.

It's not enough to tackle just the symptoms of poverty. You have to tackle the causes of poverty.

I am a social liberal.

Jay-Z is a hero, Sam Walton is a hero - these are not exactly communitarian champions. These are - in some cases, literally; in others, just figuratively - gangster heroes. That's who is worshipped: people who get away with it.

Climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans' care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world's greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing.

Walmart's period of explosive growth coincided with decades of wage stagnation and deindustrialization. By applying relentless downward pressure on prices and wages, the company came to dominate both consumer spending and employment in small towns and rural areas across the middle of the country.

It's - the working class of San Francisco and the Bay Area is being pushed out of its old neighborhoods because of the skyrocketing cost of housing, and there's no real working class left because these are jobs for engineers and managers and designers - very smart people.

Lawyers, judges, doctors, shrinks, accountants, investigators and, not least, journalists could not do the most basic tasks without a veil of secrecy. Why shouldn't the same be true of those professionals who happen to be government officials?

A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents.

Everyone finds justification for his or her views in logic and analysis, but a personal philosophy often emerges from some archaic part of the mind, an early idea of how the world should be.

The similarities are limited but real. They amount to a shared disgust with politics as usual in America. The Tea Party focuses on the federal government; Occupy Wall Street focuses on corporate America and its influence over the government.

Too many talented and supremely calculating politicians, including Nixon and Clinton, have destroyed their careers, or come close, by acting in ways that were obviously against their own interests.

The hollowing out of the heartland was good for Walmart's bottom line: its slogan might have been an amoral maxim attributed to Lenin - 'The worse, the better.'

The Iraq war was always a long shot. But it was made immeasurably longer by its principal architects in Washington, including Douglas Feith, who ignored expert advice, reserved most of their effort for fighting each other in ideological battles, and regarded the Iraqi people as an afterthought.

It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.

Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.

'The Assassins' Gate' is a very tightly controlled story of the ideas that led to the war and the consequences of those ideas in Iraq, and there is no doubt about where it is going and what kind of groundwork is being laid.

No-one can say when the unwinding began, when the coil that held America together in its secure and sometime shifting grip first gave way.

The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up.