Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.

Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.

Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.

Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.

At the age of nine, I could cross the length of Glasgow on a succession of buses, wearing regulation garter-topped stockings and compulsory cap and - if I'd done well enough to earn the honour in last week's test - with a First World War medal on a striped ribbon pinned to my brown blazer. I must have looked like a chocolate soldier.

Peace, above all things, is to be desired, but blood must sometimes be spilled to obtain it on equable and lasting terms.

My parents were of the generation that lived through the Second World War, but I grew up listening to my mother recounting her dad's tales about his terrible experiences during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and later on the Western Front.

It is better we disintegrate in peace and not in pieces.