Like all parents, I want to give my kids the best start in life.

Every part of society should honour the debt we owe those who've served our country.

I believe that enabling former service personnel to travel more easily is the least we can do.

Having served in the Forces a positive when it comes to applying for jobs. But we know some former service personnel can find the transition difficult.

It is often said there is a great deal of talent in the Conservative Parliamentary Party. This is true, but too many of the brightest and best remain on the backbenches.

No government can maintain the public's confidence if it is outwardly split.

Things don't always go according to plan. That's life and that's government.

The more the government has centralised, the less houses we have built.

I want to reignite the idea of community with a positive conservatism in which the word 'development' has a new connotation, kind of like a social revolution.

One of the cruellest things of all is to have a huge deficit in this country, meaning that everyone's children will be expected to pay back for our debt today. That is unfair as well.

A tax is something people pay out of income.

If you believe in staying at home and looking after your kids, and bringing your kids up, we think it is a fantastic thing to do.

Look, ideally I'd like to have free money to give to everybody. The reality is in government you have to choose and make decisions.

My great hope for my speck of time on this planet would be that I live and die, and that what I leave behind has made some kind of impression and has been for the better in terms of my family and friends and, in my case, public service.

I don't see any reason why society can't function well when people come together in the common interest under our system. In fact that's what the Big Society is all about!

It's impossible to know precisely what constitutes the right house price but I do know that house prices doubling or even tripling over a 10 year period caused a lot of people to find that getting a foot on the housing ladder is near on impossible.

We want councillors and MPs to be more closely involved in housing issues because this will help to strengthen local democracy and accountability.

Throughout the ages it has always been possible to point to good and bad architecture.

We must formulate policies to allow everyone to have the same opportunities in life and fix our broken society too.

Broken Britain isn't just about our indebted economy, it's also about our broken society and broken politics too.

Newspapers in this country are famously independent of politics.

We need a system where some politicians - who quite rightly respond to the public mood - are prepared to stand up in favour of housebuilding, so I came up with a system that gives local people something they really want in return for building more homes. In our case in Hatfield, it's a new town centre.

People like me - who set up a homelessness foundation, worked with all the homeless charities, authored probably six of seven homelessness papers - don't make changes without thinking through the impact of them on the homeless.

It is ludicrous to suggest that we would ever do things that would end with people living on our streets.

People pay their licence fee in this country because people believe that we should have public service broadcast programming. Of course, there are lots of different ways you could do that.

We may forget it, among the glitz of the Christmas lights, but capitalism can be a profoundly moral force.

Businesses, not benefits, are the true ladder of social mobility.

Look at the growing middle class in India. Small businesses are not just a source of jobs and prosperity: they are the driving force of social justice too.

I did not have a second job while being an MP.

I see the Conservative party becoming more and more attractive to people from all different backgrounds, particularly because so many of the immigrant communities are people who work hard and get on in life... so I think they are naturally Conservative.

Taxi drivers up and down the country are at the vanguard of the electric vehicle revolution.

I think it's absolutely extraordinary that any Conservative MP considered even for one minute installing Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street.

One of my priorities is getting the trains to run on time, and as a commuter myself I understand all too well the frustration caused by endless delays and cancellations.

Arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence. Not a pretty cocktail of personality traits in the best of situations. No sirree. Not a pretty cocktail in an office-mate and not a pretty cocktail in a head of state. In fact, in a leader, it's a lethal cocktail.

We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior.

New York has arguably become the quintessential 1 percent city, a city that has been so given over to the rich that you now have to be rich to live here. Or not live here: New York's also a preferred destination for foreign money spent on vast, lifeless apartments in the sky that are occupied a couple of weeks a year at most.

I don't do any research. It's all about gut. Editing - it's always about gut.

Americans who grew up in the 1930s or 1940s still have some fleeting memory of what the country was like before it became the steroidal superpower it is today.

I really don't despise anyone. But there is a list of a half dozen people I would prefer never to hear from or see again.

It could safely be said that Iraqis are dying at a faster clip since the American-led invasion and occupation than they did during the last decade of Saddam Hussein's rule.

As any journalist will tell you, there are few professional situations as vexing as when a friend becomes involved in a major story that you feel you must cover.

Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible - and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist's task becomes ever more difficult.

A workday lunch that lasts as long as a transcontinental flight is an impossibility for all but the most pliant and footloose of food tourists. To get in the game, you need a thick wallet, an adventurous palate, and a whole lot of time.

Every man in the back of their minds would like to own a bar or a racehorse.

The fact is that movie stars are as insecure as the rest of us - if not more so. Many live in a luxurious bubble in which their best friends are their trainer, their hairdresser, their publicist, and their Kabbalah instructor.

People think they have to be ambitious. But at a certain age, all you want is to be around nice, decent people.

The last thing businessmen want to do is sit in a room filled with other businessmen. A room full of money is a pretty boring sight - unless it's yours, of course.

I have always thought you could take the measure of a man by his sports manners - that is to say, the way in which he conducts himself on the playing field, or even over a game of chess or cards.

Memory is often - perhaps usually - a distorting lens: what we think we remember isn't the way it was at all. It's what we'd like to remember.

In Britain, libel damages are small and people build them into the cost of doing business. In America, libel is very rare and much harder to prove, but the damages are enormous.