Tony Blair

I think the journey for a politician goes from wanting to please all the people all the time, to a political leader that realises in the end his responsibility is to decide. And when he decides, he divides.

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

Conflict is not inevitable, but disarmament is… everyone now accepts that if there is a default by Saddam the international community must act to enforce its will.

There is no way you’re going to have an event like 9/11 and expect things to remain the same. They killed 3,000 people in New York on that day, and if they could have they would’ve killed 300,000.

Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war.

I would’ve loved to have been in a band, but sadly I just wasn’t good enough.

Much research, including a widely quoted Rand Corporation study of 1994, has shown that prevention and treatment are considerably more cost-effective than the coercive [drug war] measures that receive the bulk of funding. Such nonpunitive measures are also of course far more humane.

We can win an awful lot of people into the political spectrum, by offering something that is … radical.

We Marxists believe that revolution will occur in other countries, as well. But it will occur at a time when it will be considered possible or necessary by revolutionaries of those countries.

We have before us the examples of the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. We must remember how long these required to achieve their union. When a solid foundation is laid, if the mason is able and his materials good, a strong house can be built.

Other human rights atrocities from African slavery to the killing fields of Cambodia, the Armenian and Rwandan Genocides are all of course to be remembered, but diluting their particularity or comparing degrees of evil does no good.

Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level – there’s a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy.

If you want to preserve – I’m very serious now – if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press. And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.

Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.

We don’t need a weakened government but a strong government that would take responsibility for the rights of the individual and care for the society as a whole.

We have a planetary emergency. We have to find a way to create, in the generation of those alive today, a sense of generational mission.

The PR industry…have a conception of what a democracy ought to be…the specialized class are trained to do their work for the service of the masters…and the rest of the population ought to be deprived of any form of organization because organization just causes trouble.

Spying has always gone on since ancient times.

[on Trump] This guy’s shame has no limits.

People are tired of seeing politicians as all talk and no action.

Karl Marx said, ‘The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.’ A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world you’d better try to understand it. That doesn’t mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that’s helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.