In truth politeness is artificial good humor it covers the natural want of it and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.

Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.

I like to say jazz music is kind of like my musical equivalent of comfort food. You know it's always where I go back to when I just want to feel sort of grounded.

I wanted to be a great white hunter a prospector for gold or a slave trader. But then when I was eight my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.

I know I had my equivalents in Adrian Lester and Lenny James when I was at drama school. I remember David Harewood doing 'Othello' at the National and Adrian Lester having done Cheek by Jowl's famous 'As You Like It and Company' at the Donmar. Not necessarily performances I saw but just the fact they happened was massively encouraging.

Every adversity every failure and every heartache carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or greater Benefit.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.

Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience.

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

My dad told me that no one could ever make it as a writer that my chances were equivalent to winning the lottery - which was good for me because I like to have something to prove.

My dad was a Marine. He was one of the Montford Point Marines. Those are the equivalent of the Tuskegee Airmen for Marines. He's a tough tough guy. When I was 15 we had a fight and I didn't speak to him for 10 years.

Europe is dying. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.

Ten to 20 years out driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.

Today I can announce a raft of reforms that we estimate could save over 2.5 million police hours every year. That's the equivalent of more than 1 200 police officer posts. These reforms are a watershed moment in policing. They show that we really mean business in busting bureaucracy.

There are people in the public sector with a range of experiences that have no equivalent in business but are essential to governing like keeping a kid in school or helping someone get and hold a job. The value of those skills can't easily be measured against a bottom line.

I've always thought of beauty therapy 'alternative' treatments and the like as the female equivalent of brothels - for essentially self-deceiving people who feel a bit hollow and have to pay to be touched.