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There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.

I am sorry to upset my colleagues by saying we wasted four years in opposition, but if you do get so badly defeated as a party you do have to face up to some painful facts and you do have to change.

Intellectuals are too sentimental for me.

I couldn't join a party that, frankly, tolerates members who are bigots for one thing, homophobes, racists.

It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.

It's a shame and a disgrace that so few people take part in the political process.

Social democrats are characteristically modest - a political quality whose virtues are overestimated. We need to apologise a little less for our shortcomings and speak more assertively of achievements. That these were always incomplete should not trouble us.

I couldn't have attended half the parties that I was supposed to have been to according to the newspapers. It bothers me.

I don't like intellectuals, or, at least, people who call themselves that way, because I am under the impression that there is always something condescending in their demeanour, and I don't like condescending people.