The application of collective guilt, running from one generation to another, is a dangerous doctrine which would leave few modern nations unscathed.
As a motive for terror, religion has more often than not required a good deal of lubrication by lucre.
The West as a whole in the early 1990s become obsessed with a ‘peace dividend’ that would be spent over and over again on any number of soft-hearted and sometimes soft-headed causes. Politicians forget that the only real peace dividend is peace.
As the former dissident Vladimir Bukovsky one remarked – referring to the Russian proverb to the effect that you cannot make an omlette without breaking eggs – he had seen plenty of broken eggs, but had never tasted any omlette.
Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.
Remember, George, this is no time to go wobbly.
There are no personal sympathies in politics.
I shan’t be pulling the levers there but I shall be a very good back-seat driver.
We have become a grandmother.
Whether at home or abroad, the task of statesman is to work with human nature warts and all, and to draw on instincts and even prejudices that can be turned to good purpose. It is never to try to recreate Mankind in a new image.
Bribing regimes to comply with requirements which they should have acknowledged in the first place is not a process that appeals to me.
It’s a funny old world.
All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail. It must be business as usual.
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.
When will Labour learn that you cannot build Jerusalem in Brussels.
I can cope with nine of them, so they ought to be able to stand one of me. They could end the tiresomeness and stubbornness by giving me what I want.
You don’t win by just being against things, you only win by being for things and making your message perfectly clear.
Never in the history of human credit has so much been owed.
I believe we should continue to have a partnership of national states each retaining the right to protect its vital interests, but developing more effectively than at present the habit of working together.
Whether it is in the United States or in mainland Europe, written constitutions have one great weakness. That is that they contain the potential to have judges take decisions which should properly be made by democratically elected politicians.