Great Throughts Treasury

"Yes, I did have to struggle very hard to get this through, but the reason I did it was because I thought it was the right thing to do. I didn't take this on myself... just because I thought, 'Let's give myself a really hard time for a couple of years!"

"Yes, I feel I've got something to say. If people want to listen, that's great, and if they don't, that's their choice."

"You choose your own reality and you - social media then amplifies those conspiracy theories. So that's why I say social media is itself a revolutionary phenomenon."

"You don't have to keep looking at the future foreign policy in terms, simply, of the past."

"You get these insurgent movements of populism, left and right. An insurgent movement of populism took my political party over in the UK for example."

"You know, the media and politicians are always gonna be in a bit of tension with one another and probably most of the time that's healthy and indeed even creative. But it's where - it's really when news organisations are used as kind of instruments of politics that it gets tricky."

"You know, one of the things I've learnt since coming out of office is how much easier it is to give the advice than take the decision. I mean, you know, it's tough."

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

"You sit with our country's flag; you do not represent our country's interest. This is 2005, not 1945. We're not fighting each other anymore. These are our partners and colleagues and our future lies in Europe."

"Your loss we count as our loss. Your struggle we take as our struggle."

"you have to be able to answer those questions plainly and clearly. There can be qualifications and get-outs, but the answers must remain comprehensible, because they define you. They add up to a political, not merely personal, character. This requires thought, detailed analysis and intellectual rigour. Politics is a far more intellectual business than is often realized. You may think: Well, if it?s simplicity that?s required, you don?t need a whole lot of detail. Wrong. The simplicity is not born of superficial analysis. It is simple precisely because it is the product of being worked through."

"You've got problems in Central Asia. And you've got problems within our own communities back home. So if we end up saying, look, this has nothing to do with Islam or it's got no connection with that broader question, then we look, frankly, as if we're in denial about the problem. And the interesting thing in the Middle East is that they have absolutely no problem there in identifying that as Islamist extremism and calling it that."

"You've got to listen but you've also got to lead."