- Mr Right never came along. And it was never a sufficient priority to go out looking for him.
- [on the then Home Secretary Michael Howard] "He has something of the night about him".
- Television turns out a diet of swearing, drunkenness, drug-taking, shouting and screaming, abuse of authority, sex, criminality and provocative humor, delivered in Estuary English. That is before the watershed; after which it merely gets worse.
- For years there's been an assumption that as society gets more civilised and doesn't have a death penalty, it's going to be a much gentler, kinder, more decent society to live in. Now look at the society we do live in as a result of all that thinking. It's a society in which children kill each other, the murder rate has absolutely shot up, you've got rampant paedophilia. That's the society which all this so-called enlightened thinking has created and it's because we've lost sight of one very fundamental fact. There is such a thing as evil and if you do not fight it, it will eventually triumph.
- The only way you can interest people in politics is when they're faced with a real choice. When I had my first vote the world was divided into two conflicting political ideologies - capitalism versus communism. There was an enormous difference in this country between the Conservative Party and a socialist party. Young people today have never seen a socialist party. Blair (Tony Blair) and Brown (Gordon Brown) weren't about socialism, Foot (Michael Foot) and Kinnock (Neil Kinnock) were. It mattered to people who ran the country. Now they don't see that difference. They're not making decisions about political philosophy.
- To fight socialism and solve seemingly insoluble problems. (On her reason for going into politics)
- It was non-stop vulgarity. To record 30 minutes for the programme you have to film it for two and a half hours. And two and a half hours of Carr's sense of humour was more than I could stand. (On appearing on Have I Got News For You with Jimmy Carr)
- Let's take the issue of gay marriage. I do not care tuppence what consenting adults do. It's not my business. The state does not belong in bedrooms. So I'm not authoritarian. I don't say: 'You shouldn't do this, you must do that.' What I do say is that the state must have a preferred model, and the model that has served us throughout the millennia is marriage - a man and a woman in a union that is generally open to procreation. Marriage isn't about two people; it is the basis for the family. That's why it's unique, and therefore I think society can say we're keeping marriage for a man and a woman.
- There have to be sensible limits to the smoking ban. Some councils want to ban smoking in parks and meanwhile a campaign grows to ban smoking in all public places including the streets. Heaven help the children of smokers if mum or Dad can no longer nip outside for a fag but give these busybodies enough time and smoking will be banned from private houses on the grounds that visiting workmen might be affected. I have never been a smoker and I do not like cigarette smoke but I need a lot of convincing that I shall be unable to avoid it in a park. Freedom should be curtailed only in the interests of protecting others from harm and not merely to give jobs or satisfaction to petty officials. Or is that no longer a basic tenet of British life?
- We've got the worst prime minister since Anthony Eden, we've got the worst leader of the opposition in the entire history of the Labour party, and we've got the worst parliament since Oliver Cromwell, and with that combination we've got the most important negotiation in 50 years
- Nigel Farage has been more successful than any politician other than Margaret Thatcher that I can think of in my lifetime of getting his agenda through, and he's actually done it from outside Westminster.
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