It's very hard to imagine the phrase 'consumer society' used so cheerfully and interpreted so enthusiastically in England.

But actually so many of the clerics that I've met particularly the Church of England clerics are people of such extraordinary smugness and arrogance and conceitedness who are extraordinarily presumptuous about the significance of their position in society.

Oh the ignorance of us upon whom Providence did not sufficiently smile to permit us to be born in New England.

Instead of having to be a member of the Royal Society to do science the way you had to be in England in the 17th 18th centuries today pretty much anybody who wants to do it can and the information that they need to do it is there.

In general science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature Cell The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.

That science has long been neglected and declining in England is not an opinion originating with me but is shared by many and has been expressed by higher authority than mine.

In some ways England is more liberal than France but I also find it more intrusive. But when you go abroad you have to accept the ways of where you live. I have to respect that.

In England with all due respect we have some of the plainest actresses in the entire world as our greatest.

If there ever was a militant religion it was that of early New England.

What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!