“I've learned never to wish for people like us. People like us are creepy.”

“I am One. I value my uniqueness. If there were more like me I would hope they were small and easy to destroy.”

“Randomisation is not a new idea. It was first proposed in the seventeenth century by John Baptista van Helmont, a Belgian radical who challenged the academics of his day to test their treatments like blood-letting and purging (based on ‘theory’) against his own, which he said were based more on clinical experience: ‘Let us take out of the hospitals, out of the Camps, or from elsewhere, two hundred, or five hundred poor People, that have Fevers, Pleurisies, etc. Let us divide them into half, let us cast lots, that one half of them may fall to my share, and the other to yours … We shall see how many funerals both of us shall have.”

“I've wasted the last five years of my life dealing in religious articles. People today find spiritual solace in ballroom dancing.”

“Conflict resolution,' said Nightingale. 'Is this what they teach at Hendon these days?''Yes, sir,' I said. 'But don't worry, they also teach us how to beat people with phone books and the ten best ways to plant evidence.”

“Anyone who can't learn from other people's mistakes simply can't learn, and that;s all there is to it. There is value in the wrong way of doing things. The knowledge gained from errors contributes to our knowledge base.”

“What he'd like to say is that he's lived it, if not the entire breadth and depth of the Christian faith then certainly the central thrust of it. The mystery, the awe, that huge sadness and grief. Oh my people.”