What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason

Politics is never a victory, it's just the remorseless grinding forward of events.

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

But only a fool sails into combat with nature

One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary.

In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.

It is perseverance, and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognized geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world.