Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.

It is impossible to treat a child too well. Children are spoiled by being ignored too much or by harshness, not by kindness.

The American middle class always wants to be upper class and is scared to death of being lower class. It's a highly mobile group of people. They're not like the people that want to be shopkeepers forever, have always been shopkeepers and want always to be shopkeepers. These people mostly are insulted by being called middle class.

The only real reason to write professionally is that you love it enough.

Reforms to product and labour markets, education, innovation, green growth, competition, taxes, health - they are the things that should be the object of our primary focus in the context of a long-term strategy to restore sustained growth.

We cannot, as a country, improve economically, socially, and culturally without quality education.

But the thing I felt most strongly about, and put at the end of one of the prison diaries, was education.

We often grow up being told that we can do this or that, but if you don't see anybody that looks like you doing it, you don't believe you can do it. But I had great teachers, and I wanted to be a great teacher.