If there is one instance in which a foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure, it was my policy on German reunification.

The messages on our banners in 1979 - freedom, opportunity, family, enterprise, ownership - are now inscribed on the banners in Leipzig, Warsaw, Budapest and even Moscow.

Obsolete weapons do not deter.

Countries trade with each other - or to be more precise people buy and sell from each other across frontiers - because that is the way to advance their interests. We do not need to beg people to trade with us - as long as we have something that people want, of a quality they expect and at a price they are prepared to pay.

One of the things being in politics has taught me is that men are not a reasoned or reasonable sex.

Socialism's results have ranged between the merely shabby and the truly catastrophic - poverty, strife, oppression and, on the killing fields of communism, the deaths this century of perhaps 100 million people. Against that doctrine was set a contrary, conservative belief in a law-governed liberty. It was this view which triumphed with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. Since then, the Left has sought rehabilitation by distancing itself from its past.

One of my favourite quotations is: 'That which thy father bequeathed thee, earn it anew, if thou wouldst possess it.'