Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.

You look around the world in 2013, and you say, 'How many prime ministers or presidents are in prison?' One or two. 'How many generals or bankers?' Two or three. 'But how many writers?' 850 or so.

Either God is alive, in which case he'll deal with us as he sees fit. Or he is dead, in which case he was never alive, it being unlikely that he died of old age.

Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.

Only when God was said to have died did various leaders, professions and sectors risk pushing themselves forward as successors.

The 19th-century pure capitalist model of society was a pyramid, concentrations of enormous wealth in a small group at the top, a not very big middle-class in the middle, and an enormous percentage of the population in the bottom part of the pyramid.