"A diplomat these days is nothing but a head waiter who's allowed to sit down occasionally" "...the great thing about history is that it is adaptable." "Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious." "Two members of my profession who are not urgently needed by my profession, Mr. Ronald Reagan and Mr. George Murphy, entered politics, and they've done extremely well. Since there has been no reciprocal tendency in the other direction, it suggests to me that our job is still more difficult than their new one." On critics: "They search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find." "The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought." "I believe that the Jews have made a contribution to the human condition out of all proportion to their numbers: I believe them to be an immense people. Not only have they supplied the world with two leaders of the stature of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx, but they have even indulged in the luxury of following neither one nor the other." "Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them." "Mervyn LeRoy, the director of Quo Vadis, gave me this gem of advice on how to play the Emperor Nero: 'The way I see Nero, this is the kinda guy who plays with himself nights'." "I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me to be the most civilized music in the world." 'When Rosalind Hicks, Agatha Christie's daughter, first saw me, she said, 'That's not Poirot.' I said, 'It is now, my dear.'" [regarding his portrayal of supersleuth Hercule Poirot] "People are annoyed with the Chinese for not respecting more human rights. But with a population that size it's very difficult to have the same attitude to human rights." "I suppose you can't blame Gorbachev [for the collapse of the Soviet Union], but it is his fault for making America the only superpower." "You can't fight terrorism without becoming a terrorist yourself." - On the American and British invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 "They require the kind of courage that none of us would have. It's a kind of courage that's very hard to understand. And it's our duty to try to understand it because it is the courage of desperation. And what is the difference between somebody who goes into a coffee house with the intention of killing as many people as possible - and does so - and somebody who's in an aeroplane at the height of five miles, unobtainable by any anti-aircraft gun, and lets their bombs drop as scientifically as possible, in order to kill as few people as possible? I guarantee that the one who tries to kill as few people as possible will kill many more than the one who goes into a snack bar and blows himself or herself up. But in this campaign, I wonder how many of the people who have been killed were terrorists? I think very, very few. To my mind, it's a big lie." - On Palestinian suicide bombers "There was a great campaign to make life difficult for Vladimir Putin when he came in. Nobody ever mentions that George Bush senior was head of the CIA. What's the difference between the CIA and the KGB? Except that probably the KGB are more thorough, intelligent, and more respectful of foreign traditions." - On Russo-American relations "Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich." - On the Iraq war in 2003 "World government is not only possible, it is inevitable; and when it comes, it will appeal to patriotism in its truest, in its only sense, the patriotism of men who love their national heritages so deeply that they wish to preserve them in safety for the common good."