Maurice Cowling quotes:

I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book... I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it.

If there is a class war-and there is-it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill. ... it is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones.

From Britain's point of view the 1939 war had been a liberal war which had been entered into in a condition of moral indignation without the resources to fight it, that it had been providential good fortune which had placed the burden of fighting on the Russians and the Americans.

Liberalism is essentially the belief that there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences, and since there can't, it is a misleading way to approach politics.

It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939...from the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat.

I'm an intellectual Thatcherite, just as I was an intellectual Powellite, and I think it important that the Conservative party should be in good hands and that it should win elections.