Tony Blair

You only require two things in life: your sanity and your wife.

Those who wish to cause religious conflict are small in number but often manage to dominate the headline.

I may find Saddam Hussein’s regime abhorrent – any normal person would – but the survival of it is in his hands.

The threat from Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological, potentially nuclear weapons capability – that threat is real.

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

I feel like everyone else in this country today. I am utterly devastated.

… the media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.

If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you’re saying, because it’s too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you’ve resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, ‘You’re an asshole,’ which maybe he or she is, and if you don’t say, ‘That’s idiotic,’ when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.

You could imagine that a democratic society would have an organization that carries out intelligence gathering functions. But that’s a very minor part of what the CIA does.

If people don’t like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

If wall street can borrow money at 0.75% interest, so can college students. We need to stop treating students as profit centers.

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

Think of the feudal system. You had kings and princes and bishops and lords and so on. They for the most part did not want power to be totally concentrated, they didn’t want total tyrants.

Indeed, Russia and the U.S. were allies during the two tragic conflicts of the Second and the First World Wars, which allows us to think there’s something objectively bringing us together in difficult times, and I think – I believe – it has to do with geopolitical interests and also has a moral component.

The depression was just a state of mind. It is over for everyone who has changed his state of mind.

The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all of the people.

I’m a history buff, and I know that big changes take time. But I also know that, setting politics aside, usually things are never as good as you think they are or as bad as you think they are. And that has served me well temperamentally.

I’ve had a beautiful, I’ve had a flawless campaign. You’ll be writing books about this campaign.

It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.

For Russia, there is not and there may not be another political option but democracy. However, Russian democracy is… not at all the realization of standards imposed on us from outside.

The Russian people have their own cultural code, their own tradition.