You must recognise that failure is 90% emotion, 10% self-fulfilling reality, and the fact that we are haunted by it is neither here nor there.The zen of it is that success and failure are both an illusion, that these illusions will keep you from the desk, they will spoil your talent; they will eat away at your life and your sleep and the way you speak to the people you love.

Anne Enright in „Falling short: seven writers reflect on failure“, The Guardian, June 21, 2013

„The British are supposed to be self-doubting rather than self-righteous – since the dissolution of empire, anyway. It’s one of the things I’m most patriotic about. From our awkwardness and embarrassment has sprung a complexity of literature, comedy and pop music that no other country can touch, for all their sunny weather and expressive street carnivals. You don’t get Fawlty Towers, Morrissey and Martin Amis from a nation that likes itself.“

Victoria Coren in „George Osborne, gawd bless yer“, The Observer, Sunday 7 April 2013 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/07/george-osborne-does-mockney-accent

„(J)ust how far can we use our own cultural and moral values to illuminate a very different situation from our own, particularly when the evidence for that ancient society is so patchy? Is objectivity even possible? The answer is that there can be no right or definite answer. All we can do is ask appropriate questions, evaluate the evidence as carefully as we can in the hope that understanding its context may help towards a solution, and be aware that historical interpretations are, in fact, just that – they are not full answers or complete narratives, but readings of ancient evidence made from particular modern perspectives.“

Hope V. and Huskinson J., „The Roman Family“ in Rome – City of People (Milton Keynes, 2006)