Central authority is bad. The bias should be for freedom. And without a central authority there are lots of little authorities and we learn which ones to trust.

You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government you have to travel to the city.

Greater personal choice individually tailored services stronger local accountability greater efficiency - these are all central to the new direction of travel we have set for our public services.

Here you have a new technology and if that technology is going to work you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. It's just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads.

There is no development strategy more beneficial to society as a whole - women and men alike - than the one which involves women as central players.

I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society what we owe to ourselves.

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now the novelist must take a good hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

The central task of science is to arrive stage by stage at a clearer comprehension of nature but this does not at all mean as it is sometimes claimed to mean a search for mastery over nature.

'Eyes Wide Open' took shape from two real life events straight from my own past. One was the sad suicide of my young nephew a troubled kid who was found at the bottom of a landmark cliff in central California. The second was a chance encounter forty years ago with none other than ahem Charles Manson!