If you are guided by opinion polls, you are not practicing leadership -- you are practicing followership.

To me consensus seems to be - the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no-one believes, but to which no-one objects - the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner "I stand for consensus"?

Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.

When in August 1793 a British delegation showed their hosts a terrestrial globe, it turned into a diplomatic incident, for the Chinese were furious to see that their empire covered so little of it. For centuries the Chinese had thought of themselves as 'The Middle Kingdom', that is the centre of the civilized world. To see otherwise was a shock.

If you want to cut your own throat, don't come to me for a bandage.

A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.

Everything a politician promises at election time has to be paid for either by higher taxation or by borrowing.