Tony Blair Quotes

For most normal people, politics is a distant, occasionally irritating fog.

The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The Pieces are in flux. Soon, They will SETTLE again. Before They do, let us RE-ORDER this world around us!!!

Politics may be the art of the possible, but at least in life, give the impossible a go.

I reckon it takes ten years to change a country. And that is ten years of focused change-making. At a minimum. Fifteen is better and twenty optimum.

A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in...And how many want out.

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.

I didn't come into politics to change the Labour Party. I came into politics to change the country.

The single hardest thing for a practicing politician to understand is that most people, most of the time, don’t give politics a first thought all day long. Or if they do, it is with a sigh… before going back to worrying about the kids, the parents, the mortgage, the boss, their friends, their weight, their health, sex and rock ‘n’ roll.

If you don’t feel safe, nothing else in your life is going to compensate for the absence of basic security.

The word ‘government’ is derived from the Greek kubernao, meaning to pilot a ship, as in Plato’s phrase ‘the Ship of State’. To steer a course, governments need a plan.

But all progressive movements have to beware their own successes. The progress they make reinvents the society they work in, and they must in turn reinvent themselves to keep up, otherwise they become hollow echoes from a once loud, strong voice, reverberating still, but to little effect. As their consequence diminishes, so their dwindling adherents become ever more shrill and strident, more solicitous of protecting their own shrinking space rather than understanding that the voice of the times has moved on and they must listen before speaking. It happens in all organizations. It is fatal to those who are never confronted by a reckoning that forces them to face up and get wise.

The right to demand the best and refuse the worst and do so not by virtue of your wealth, but your equal status as citizen, thats precisely what the modern Labour Party should stand for

Margaret Thatcher was a towering political figure. Very few leaders get to change not only the political landscape of their country but of the world. Margaret was such a leader. Her global impact was vast. And some of the changes she made in Britain were, in certain respects at least, retained by the 1997 Labour government, and came to be implemented by governments around the world. Even if you disagreed with her as I did on certain issues and occasionally strongly, you could not disrespect her character or her contribution to Britain's national life. She will be sadly missed.

I pay tribute to the campaign [<nowiki/>Jeremy Corbyn] ran, I think that he showed a lot of character in the way that he ran that campaign. He generated a lot of enthusiasm. I buy all of that. But I also think that it's important and salutary for us to remember this government is in a greater degree of mess than any government I can remember. Even in the 1990s the Tory government was a paragon of stability compared with this, and yet we're a couple of points ahead and I think I'm right that [Corbyn] is not yet ahead of her as Prime Minister. So I pay tribute to all of that, but I still say 'Come on guys, we should be 15, 20 points ahead.

The battles of this century … are less likely to be the product of extreme political ideology—like those of the 20th century—<nowiki/>but they could easily be fought around the questions of cultural or religious difference.