One thing about bureaucrats is that they never swallow their young. Leave them alone and you'll find them increasing every year.

More good things in life are lost by indifference than ever were lost by active hostility.

The kind of people I myself represent in parliament; salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on, these are, in a political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganised and unselfconscious.

In all my life I have treated the press with marked contempt and remarkable success.

My headmaster chastised me with a diabolical instrument a leather strap tacked to a piece of wood but he taught me with such villainous success that I am now Prime Minister.

A man may be a tough, concentrated, successful moneymaker and never contribute to his country anything more than a horrible example. A manager may be tough and practical, squeezing out, while the going is good, the last ounce of profit and dividend, and may leave behind him an exhausted industry and a legacy of industrial hatred. A tough manager may never look outside his own factory walls or be conscious of his partnership in a wider world. I often wonder what strange cud such men sit chewing when their working days are over, and the accumulating riches of the mind have eluded them.

A manager may be tough and practical, squeezing out, while the going is good, the last ounce of profit and dividend . . .