Platitudes? Yes, there are platitudes. Platitudes are there because they are true.

It's okay, Chancellor, you can touch them. Sometimes I just strip down to a tank top and stare at these guns in front of a mirror all day long.

The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.

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.

Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.

They are all a rotten lot. Schmidt and the Americans and we are the only people who would do any standing up and fighting if necessary.

... when a big man has a big idea I never like to stand in his way.