"I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing."

“I don't need religion to tell me to hate fags.”

“Annihilating all that's made, To a green thought in a green shade.”

Source : "The Garden" l. 47 (1681)

“I loved the illusion, the conviction, the desire - whatever you want to call it - that the words were agents rather than extensions of reality. That they made my life happen, rather than just recorded it happening.”

“Lately, they were always reassuring each other that nothing was wrong; and probably it was true—life wasn’t supposed to be incredible, after all. Life wasn’t some incredible movie. Life was all the movies, ever, happening at once. There were good ones, bad ones, some went straight to video.”

“Writing can give full meaning to characters and avoid pure stereotype.”

“The travesty of slavery wasn't physical abuse. It was the moral abuse of looking at a human being as if they are an animal.”

“History is not merely what happened. It is what happened in the context of what might have happened.”

Source : Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Valerie Pearl, Blair Worden (1981). “History & imagination: essays in honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper”, Duckworth Publishing

“We need a new kind of citizenship, so that we can see citizens as themselves earning the rank of patriot because of their involvement in their community affairs....We as a society need to be encouraging people to focus not just on individual wants but on serving the larger community.”