I think I'm becoming more relaxed in front of a camera. I suppose I'll always feel slightly more at home on stage. It's more of an actor's medium. You are your own editor nobody else is choosing what is being seen of you.

The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.

And so our goal on health care is if we can get instead of health care costs going up 6 percent a year it's going up at the level of inflation maybe just slightly above inflation we've made huge progress. And by the way that is the single most important thing we could do in terms of reducing our deficit. That's why we did it.

A face is too slight a foundation for happiness.

Fortune which has a great deal of power in other matters but especially in war can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces.

A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.

My wife has a slight impediment in her speech. Every now and then she stops to breathe.

If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it that's the time to hold your tongue.

None of us had any idea of how successful Downton was going to be. I thought I was signing up for another period drama that had a slightly modern feel. It had a freedom about it because it was coming out of the head of Julian Fellowes. Anything could happen and generally did.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.