Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The truth is a good thing.
The stakes are high in politics.
Personal responsibility matters.
Music turns the world upside down.
The late 1960s was another time and another world.
People wear extraordinarily bright colours in India.
I look back on my schooldays with a warm glow of nostalgia.
I do rather rejoice when people come up to talk to me about railways.
I have Spanish ancestry and, indeed, speak the language, up to a point.
As a presenter, you have to speak with artificial energy and enthusiasm.
For all those who experienced it, the Spanish Civil War was devastating.
A wood carving of Quixote on his nag Rocinante graced my childhood home.
Sleep deprivation over quite a short period of time can make you paranoid.
I have that normal male thing of valuing myself according to the job I do.
I have liked trains since I was a boy, although I was never a train-spotter.
I have never served on a jury because MPs were exempted - or banned, I think.
A vocation is a noble thing and not to be subverted by the whims of politicians.
To be in the media is to be in the wings. Being in politics is being on the stage.
I will say what I want to say. I had some homosexual experiences as a young person.
Pablo Picasso first entered my consciousness when I was a boy of about eight years old.
If life is a soap opera you shouldn't be in too much of a hurry to get to the final credits.
You never quite know what you do in life that leaves a seed behind that grows into an oak tree.
The disease of debt has reached the top. And once it reaches the top it has no-where else to go.
Oppositions usually say ridiculous things and must embarrassingly then ditch untenable positions.
As a politician, I spent a lot of time in Washington and New York, cities that are familiar to Europeans.
I was brought up in a house where I was so aware of a life that had been broken by politics and conflict.
I can never thoroughly appreciate meals on ships because, away from land, I feel my autonomy is restricted.
The true symbolism of every facet of 'Guernica' can only be guessed at, but we do know that it haunted Picasso.
Leaving politics was a good thing. I was spared a miserable Tory government where I might have ended up as leader.
Television brings with it two dangerous hazards: the worship of celebrity and the blurring of reality and fantasy.
Non-fictionalised accounts of horrific accidents, bereavement, and the outrages of officialdom tend to move us deeply.
Were we ever to find ourselves living under a totalitarian regime, place no faith in the mercy of your fellow citizens.
It's a dilemma for every modern parent - how to keep children safe on social media without monitoring their every post.
Some people are born to trains, and some have trains thrust upon them. Fortunately, I can be included in this latter category.
Three letters send a chill down the spine of the enemy: SAS. Those letters spell out one clear message. Don't mess with Britain!
A parliamentary democracy that has developed its delicate balances over hundreds of years will not give up its sovereign rights.
What's extraordinary about Cobra Mist, and so much of what went on at Orford, was that the public were completely oblivious to it.
I love a good meal on a train, and if I'm travelling on a discount ticket, the challenge is to eat more than the price of the fare.
My own father was a refugee from the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, later going on to become a BBC radio producer after World War II.
They say travel enables you to encounter your opposite. If this is true, I think I may have met mine in a shepherd's hut in Transylvania.
My grandfather, who was always keen to promote living artists, staged an unprecedented exhibition of Peploe's works at Kirkcaldy in 1928.
My Scottish grandfather, John W. Blyth, was a man addicted to paintings. A manufacturer of linen, he spent all his surplus money on pictures.
I enjoyed dressing in Indian clothes. I loved those long, single-piece garments that come down to the knees and the white pyjamas you wear underneath.
One enjoyable consequence of being in the Scouts was that, at the start of each new school year, we had to camp out in tents on the school playing fields.
If, like me, you're interested in history, Egypt is a place of wonders. It's the land of many civilisations, including Greek, Roman, Christian, and Muslim.
British-built railways in India helped the British to make money and maintain order and, as a by-product, served to unite the country, ripe for independence.
Here in Britain, we can get a little bit snobby about American history. Yes, their history is not quite as long as ours. But it isn't all that short, either.
I think a lot of people of my generation have a certain guilt that, from the Sixties onwards, we started taking package holidays abroad and neglected our own country.
For 'Portillo's Hidden History of Britain,' I arranged to meet men and women who were witnesses to history - ordinary people who were caught up in extraordinary events.
Anyone, they say, is entitled to change his mind. Not about the defence of Britain, you're not. You either feel it in your heart, in your bones, in your gut, or you don't.