Tony Blair

I think the journey for a politician goes from wanting to please all the people all the time, to a political leader that realises in the end his responsibility is to decide. And when he decides, he divides.

I believe Mrs. Thatcher’s emphasis on enterprise was right.

Conflict is not inevitable, but disarmament is… everyone now accepts that if there is a default by Saddam the international community must act to enforce its will.

[on Jeremy Cobyn] It is a different type of Labour Party. Can it be taken back? I don’t know

I can only go one way. I’ve not got a reverse gear.

Once his wife goes to sleep it takes a minor nuclear explosion to wake her.

There is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.

It doesn’t matter who they vote for, they always vote for us…

Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children[‘s] … normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don’t understand.

Barack didn’t just talk about hope because he thought it was just a nice slogan to get votes. I mean, he and I and so many believe that if you – what else do you have if you don’t have hope?

Sometimes it’s difficult to accept, to recognise one’s own mistakes, but one must do it. I was guilty of overconfidence and arrogance, and I was punished for that.

Trumpism is one of many manifestations of the effects of the neoliberal policies of the past generation. These have led to extreme concentration of wealth along with stagnation for the majority.

America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster’; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.

As I have said for many years throughout this land, we’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change.

I have never stated Russia is an energy superpower, but we have more reserves than almost anybody else. We have always behaved, and we will continue to behave, in a responsible way. We intend to participate in the elaboration of common rules in the energy sector and to abide by rules which are developed together.

How do you expect the Germans to revolt when they don’t even dare walk on the grass?

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

There are numerous bugbears in the profession of a politician. First, ordinary life suffers. Second, there are many temptations to ruin you and those around you. And I suppose third, and this is rarely discussed, people at the top generally have no friends.

I think one can give a good argument that looting isn’t violence at all. In a sense, most of us are looters, or at any rate we are benefiting from others’ looting.

Nobody respects a country with a poor army, but everybody respects a country with a good army. I raise my toast to the Finnish army