The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare.

I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

We hoped to land a wild cat that would tear out the bowels of the Boche. Instead we have stranded a vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water.

... I think it would be so much better for me to learn something which would be useful to me in the army, as well as affording me exercise and amusement.

September the 11th was a huge shock in the United States. It was the first time you had been hit at home in your own territory by terrorist on this scale.

Socialists have always spent much of their time seeking new titles for their beliefs, because the old versions so quickly become outdated and discredited.

I exercise my right as a free citizen to spend my own money in my own way, so that I can go on the day, the time, to the doctor I choose and get out fast.

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.

We were not made by Nature to work, or even to play, from eight o'clock in the morning till midnight. We ought to break our days and our marches into two.

Painting is the same kind of problem as unfolding a long, sustained interlocked argument... It is a proposition commanded by a single unity of conception.

The IIFA Weekend has my unprecedented support. The relationship between India and the UK is long standing and one we would like to keep developing forever.

We are within measurable, or imaginable, distance of a real Armageddon. Happily there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators.

Churchill was fundamentally what the English call unstable - by which they mean anybody who has that touch of genius which is inconvenient in normal times.

Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.

There is little hope for democracy if the hearts of men and women in democratic societies cannot be touched by a call to something greater than themselves.

When I look at him [Edward Heath] and he looks at me, I don't feel that it is a man looking at a woman. More like a woman being looked at by another woman.

When all the objectives of government include the achievement of equality - other than equality before the law - that government poses a threat to liberty.

The appalling details of the campaign of intimidation - which include grave-robbing - show the depths to which the animal extremists are prepared to stoop.

We (The British) have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.

There are no limits to the majestic future which lies before the mighty expanse of Canada with its virile, aspiring, cultured, and generous-hearted people.

You have to run risks. There are no certainties in war. There is a precipice on either side of you - a precipice of caution and a precipice of over-daring.

The vision of personalised public services - meeting the individual needs of all our citizens - requires continuing reform in the way services are delivered

America knows it has got to deal with its deficit problems so that it, too, can promise it is making its proper and best contributions to the world economy.

A country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist.

Let's turn British inventions into British industries, British factories and British jobs. Let them make pounds for us, not dollars marks or yen for others.

Socialists cry “Power to the people”, and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean - power over people, power to the State.

The world, nature, human beings, do not move like machines. The edges are never clear-cut, but always frayed. Nature never draws a line without smudging it.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

Personally I think that private property has a right to be defended. Our civilisation is built up on property, and can only be defended by private property.

Elderly people and those in authority cannot always be relied upon to take enlightened and comprehending views of what they call the indiscretions of youth.

Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one's pulse and taking one's temperature.

In every era, there are only one or two moments when nations come together and reach agreements that make history, because they change the course of history.

As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.

I want to get totally rid of class distinction. As someone put it one of the papers this morning: Marks and Spencer have triumphed over Karl Marx and Engels.

We should not underestimate the enormity of the task which lies ahead. But little can be achieved without sound money. It is the bedrock of sound government.

It's the Labour Government that have brought us record peacetime taxation. They've got the usual Socialist disease - they've run out of other people's money.

I believe that the royal family are a focus of patriotism, of loyalty, of affection and of esteem. That is a rare combination, and we should value it highly.

It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of socialism.

In Great Britain, governments often change their policies without changing their men. In France, they usually change their men without changing their policy.

I never slept as soundly as the night following Pearl Harbor. For I knew that The American Race would now be entering the war and it would never be the same.

In excluding me from the shadow cabinet, Margaret Thatcher has chosen what I believe to be the only wholly honest solution and one which I accept and welcome.

Every dog is allowed one bite, but a different view is taken of a dog that goes on biting all the time. He may not get his licence returned when it falls due.

We are not prepared to consider special category status for certain groups of people serving sentences for crime. Crime is crime is crime, it is not political

We have been ruled by men who live by illusions ... the illusion that there is some other way of creating wealth than hard work and satisfying your customers.

The accumulation of wealth is a process which is of itself morally neutral. True, as Christianity teaches, riches bring temptations. But then so does poverty.

I had no idea of the enormous and unquestionably helpful part that humbug plays in the social life of great peoples dwelling in a state of democratic freedom.

Unless some effective supranational government can be set up and brought quickly into action, the prospects of peace and human progress are dark and doubtful.

He (Aneurin Bevan) enjoys prophesying the imminent fall of the capitalist system, and is prepared to play a part, any part, in its burial, except that of mute.

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