quotes of the week

It is better to have lived one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep.

Jim Ballard, husband of missing mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, quoting one of her favourite sayings

We didn't have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, you know, asking, 'Are you all right - are you sure you don't have a ghastly problem?' You got on with it.

The Duke of Edinburgh on his shipmates at war in the Pacific

I have no memory of the 1983 election campaign.

Nick Howard, aged 19, in the London Evening Standard under the byline of former Labour shadow cabinet member Bryan Gould, elected as MP for Dagenham at the 1983 election

When Christopher Isherwood wrote a book starting with the line 'I am a camera', I don't think people rushed around believing he was a Box Brownie.

Stewart Steven, editor of the Evening Standard explaining how the thoughts of a "first-time voter" were ascribed to Bryan Gould

I'm all in favour of Conservative leaders thinking rather more than they do at present.

Alan Beith, Liberal Democrat deputy leader, on Conservative Foundation 2000