I have met all the most gifted people in our generation and you're the best.

Charlie, you’re one of the most gifted people I’ve ever known. And I don’t mean in terms of my other students. I mean in terms of anyone I’ve ever met.

The people I've known I must say are extraordinary. When I think about some of them, I can't believe that I knew them all. And I think the reason I knew most of them at the beginning was because they were of Bogie's generation, 25 years my senior, not mine. But they were the most talented people of all.

One of the most courageous and committed politicians I have ever met.

I understand politicians better than anybody.

The kinds of people you meet on political campaigns are some of the best human beings. They're survivors, and they're spunky, and they have personalities, and they spend months sleeping on couches and living on, whatever, pizza and coffee and bad beer

You are as good a politician as you are a prelate.

His success in dealing with the strong egos of the men in his cabinet suggests that in the hands of a truly great politician the qualities we generally associate with decency and morality — kindness, sensitivity, compassion, honesty, and empathy — can also be impressive political resources.

I guess you could say that, moving from banking, I am one of the few people entering politics to be going to a more popular profession.

It is a great privilege to represent extremely thoughtful and informed individuals like you.

Untalented people, unintelligent people go into politics. Those who are talented become artists, painters, poets, philosophers, mystics, dancers. They have a thousand and one other beautiful things to do, not politics. Only the third rate, the most unintelligent part of a country, moves into politics.

The belief that the laws of economics and the judgements of the markets can be suspended by clever people — and Nigel Lawson was one of the cleverest people in British politics — is a perpetual temptation to folly. That folly cost us dear. But then the idea that other clever people — and Jacques Delors was one of the cleverest people I met in European politics — can build their Tower of Babel on the uneven foundation of ancient nations, different languages and diverse economies is still more dangerous. Work on that shaky construction is still proceeding.

The only politician to be a rising star in three decades.

I once described Washington as a doer surrounded by thinkers. He knew how to make the thinkers work for him, and only a truly superb politician and leader is able to do that.