Born on March 8 — Quotes

Until the artist is dead, we are not able to determine his work in all its dimensions.

There must be more rigorous enforcement of rules promoting transparency in the international banking and financial systems, especially more stringent KYC rules on customer identity, source of wealth, and even country of origin.

There is no wisdom of man that can change men or change nations; it is the power and wisdom of God that can.

On the face of it, these look like bad times for Labour and for Ed Miliband's leadership. There seems to be no strategy, no narrative and little energy. Old faces from the Brown era still dominate the shadow cabinet and they seem stuck in defending Labour's record in all the wrong ways: we didn't spend too much money, we'll cut less fast and less far, but we can't tell you how.

[On the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government] I think it should be made clear that the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, they have not got into bed together; they are merely sharing a room.

Old Labour’s international solidarity did not require the abandonment of the national democratic inheritance. But today’s left-liberals simply do not understand the traditional commitment to earning and belonging. This puts them at odds with how people understand themselves. We are beings with a tendency to attachment; in order to be open to the environment our bodies must also be closed; and in physics, atoms have a tendency to cluster. And yet in politics an ultra-liberal ideal developed that belonging, attachment and sociability, reinforced by institutions, should be replaced by the almost unmediated movement of people through space.

It always seems impossible until it's done.

Labour is apparently pursuing a sectional agenda based on the idea that disaffected Liberal Democrats and public-sector employees will give Labour a majority next time around. But we have not won, and show no signs of winning, the economic argument. We have not articulated a constructive alternative capable of recognising our weaknesses in government and taking the argument to the coalition. We show no relish for reconfiguring the relationship between the state, the market and society. The world is on the turn, yet we do not seem equal to the challenge.

If this government is doing the right thing by fighting corruption, the Church should support it.

The institutional settlement of post-war West Germany has endured because it generated value. They retained pre-modern artisan organisations and turned them into the foundation of their contemporary economic success. They entangled and constrained capital in a myriad form of national, sectoral and localised arrangements and they emerge from the crash, virtually alone, with a productive economy and a functioning democracy, with greater equality than us and more meaningful work.

Amendments that could have prevented those on the sex offenders register from obtaining a gender recognition certificate (GRC) and strengthened the law on single sex prison allocation were voted down or withdrawn.

Thatcherism is not Tutankhamun's tomb, which you've got to seal up and guard. It has to fructify. It's an investment. Take what has been achieved and go on from there. Thatcherism breaks into different things: privatisation, the extension of individual responsibility, education. But the course is certainly set. I want to keep it, not change it.

Kandinsky was connected with Die Brücke and the Blue Rider: they had a concept and created a reality. But I prefer Jean Fautrier [French painter-artist; 1898 - 1965] with his suffering and self-absorption. And his purpose on bringing about changes was just as strong. As a result I see in Fautrier a stronger paradigm than in Kandinsky..

Faults of great people are idiots' consolation.

The most successful of the nations of the world are those who do not fall into the lure of secession but who, through thick and thin, forge unity in diversity.