The citizen's job is to be rude - to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt.

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.

The merger mania which goes on and on and on is the sign of the disappearance of competition. As we deregulate, the mergers increase, which means there's less and less competition. At the national level, at the regional level, but also at the international level.

Life is apogee, apex, decline; life is death - and everything else is open to discussion.

But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.