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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Nothing upset me more than the award of Companion of Honour to Eric Hobsbawm in reward for a lifetime of unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union.

America is the one place where you can talk of 'this nation' and everyone knows exactly what you think. People put a flag on their porch, and they do have a desire to localize everything and celebrate things locally.

Wonder and awe are the diet of the artist and without them the world would be far less meaningful to us than it is.

There is a chapter in 'Gentle Regrets' called 'Coming Home' which is really me expressing my later admiration for my father's public spirit.

The sanctity of private property is so fundamental a part of the American settlement that the country's conservatives look with suspicion on any policy that seems to prevent people from doing what they will with what is theirs.

The language of politics is spoken in the first-person plural, and for Conservatives, the duty of the politician is to maintain that first-person plural in being.

In the traditional dances, physical contact was permitted in a way that it wasn't in everyday life. The electricity of physical contact has gone therefore from young people's lives.

Delia Smith is, actually, my bete noire. I consider her a most pernicious influence.

It's right to flog a dead horse sometimes, when the previous flogging has not annihilated it.

I'm a hate figure for a certain kind of half-educated politically correct person.

If there's a local reeling party, I might go to that.

If you say something in advance - if you describe a problem as it arises, people always turn on you because they don't want to hear about it. But when it's too late to do anything, they will then turn around and say that you were right. That's human nature.

Fashion makes me laugh.

I know ideals aren't realities, but they do influence reality - social, legal, political, cultural.

I think that, on the whole, risk-taking entrepreneurial characters regard nature as a sort of background that we can use for our own advantage.

Ultimately, political order does not generate itself.

For Conservatives, all disputes over law, liberty and justice are addressed to a historic and existing community. The root of politics, they believe, is attachment - the motive in human beings that binds them to the place, the customs, the history and the people who are theirs.

Cameron's resignation really was the death knell of the Conservative Party as we knew it because that's something a proper Conservative politician cannot do: renounce leadership at the moment when it's needed.

Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.

Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.

A man can - and should - spend hours trying on jeans and finding the cut for your body type.

Jeans are never appropriate for business unless you are a artist or cowpuncher.

John McCain has taken tens of millions of dollars from special interests and lobbyists in his senate and presidential campaigns. Now, we have to wonder if he will be able to remain objective on national security matters, as millions pour into his 'charity' from oppressive foreign governments.

I oppose the spending of trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan, I strongly oppose Islamic extremism but don't believe that sending troops to die in two unwinnable wars makes sense.

I believe the GOP should pitch its big-top tent around fiscal conservatism and a muscular foreign policy rather than carnival bark outside the sideshow tents of gay marriage and reproductive choice.

The ascot connotes informality. It is something one might wear at a cocktail party in one's own flat but is not something you wear out in public.

You can't wake up one day and say 'I'm for gay marriage,' and wake up the next day and say 'I'm against it.' Wake up one day and say, 'I'm pro-choice,' and the next day wake up and say, 'I'm pro-life.' There's no credibility there.