To balance China the democracies will need new friends - and India with its fast-growing economy youthful population and democratic politics seems the obvious candidate.

No matter where I go - London Beirut Jerusalem Washington Beijing or Bangalore - I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better not pull them apart.

I don't feel finally that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man.

I try not to tune in to politics until it's two or three months before the election. Till then it's like watching preseason football.

I do not know much about politics but I am trying to do the best I can with this administration until the time shall come for me to turn it over to somebody else.

Politics makes me sick.

I don't get involved in record label politics.

Politics and power is a realm of relative influence.

I have got instincts that I think are very much in tune with people's very keen sense to see something different. I did not dream of being in politics since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I was not involved in student politics or not in that partisan way.

I didn't become leader to transform the Liberal Democrats into an enlarged form of the Electoral Reform Society. It's not the be all and end all for us. There are other very very key ambitions in politics not least social mobility and life chances that I care about as passionately if not more.

You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It's highly highly polarised. It's right left red blue up down victorious crushed.

Politics is a highly tribal business.

But I'm not interested in politics. I lose interest the microsecond it ceases to be emotional when something becomes a political movement. What I'm interested in is emotions.

I'm not going to talk like I know about politics because I'm a total amateur but maybe I can be a spokesperson for people who aren't normally interested in politics.

Religion has to stay in the heart not in politics. It is private.

Politics is show business for ugly people.

Unfortunately the global warming hysteria as I see it is driven by politics more than by science.