I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.
You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.
I would die for my country but I could never let my country die for me.
The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.
People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby.
Margaret Thatcher was not a malicious person. She was a person who couldn't see, or didn't want to see, the unfairness and disadvantaging consequences of the application of what she thought to be a renewing ideology.
Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.
I'd like to be remembered as somebody who tried to promote justice.
Newspapers are tutors as well as informers.
Is Tony Blair of the Labour party? The answer to that is profoundly 'yes', but that is not how, sentimentally, he is regarded in the Labour movement generally.
I didn't call for a ballot at the start of the miners' strike in 1984. I'll regret that until my dying day.
My first real experience of ambition was as party leader. It was my ambition for Labour to win, in which event I would be prime minister.
There are politicians who seethe with ambition all the time, and there are a lot of other politicians who don't. I'm in the second category, that's all.
The enemy of idealism is zealotry.
Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry.
No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.
The unforgivable political sin is vanity; the killer diet is sour grapes.
I take notice of those who have argued consistently for the modernisation of the E.U., but so many of the skeptics in Britain are just hostile to the whole European idea.
In the U.K. the far Right is a stain on society and there is a cultural resistance to it.
People, even independently minded people, do to an extent draw their impressions from what they are told, especially if they are told it incessantly by newspapers.
