Tony Blair Quotes

I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honour, but sometimes it is the price of leadership and the cost of conviction.

When I started out as Prime Minister I wanted to please all the people all the time. By the end I was wondering if I pleased any of the people any of the time.

Enough of talking: It is time now to do.

You only require two things in life: your sanity and your wife.

If you are trying to take a difficult decision and you're weighing up the pros and cons, you have frank conversations. Everybody knows this in their walk of life.

The intelligence is clear: (Saddam) continues to believe his WMD programme is essential both for internal repression and for external aggression.

My teachers used to call me a failure

I always say, when they ask me about American politics, is for you guys to decide who you elect.

We are going to expand enormously -- our economy, our consumption, over the years to come ... But the consequences of that on emissions are going to be severe unless we change direction.

Because I happen to believe that the best policy solutions lie in the center ground, then I want to see, how does the center revitalize itself? How does it develop the policy agenda for the future? And how do we link up people who have the same basic ideas and attachments to the same basic values across the world?

Now, again, what the center ground has got to do is to respond to people's genuine concerns and fears.

The British people are the boss.

I have never pretended to be a great House of Commons man, but I pay the House the greatest compliment I can by saying that, from first to last, I never stopped fearing it.

You don't have to keep looking at the future foreign policy in terms, simply, of the past.

Conflict is not inevitable, but disarmament is... everyone now accepts that if there is a default by Saddam the international community must act to enforce its will.

The first rule in politics is that there are no rules, at least not in the sense of inevitable defeats or inevitable victories. If you have the right policy and the right strategy, you always have a chance of winning. Without them, you can lose no matter how certain the victory seems.

I think the center ground have got to become the people of change again and not the guardians of the status quo. And that is the weakness it comes to in our campaign. You can see it in your politics, you can see it everywhere.

This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world today. It is perpetrated by fanatics who are utterly indifferent to the sanctity of human life, and we the democracies of this world are going to have to come together and fight it together.

What is obviously unfair is that the half of the population that doesn't go to university that's often on lower incomes pays more taxes in order to send other people to university, without them, you know, contributing.

Real integrity means an answer. It doesn't just mean - it doesn't mean riding the anger. And this is very difficult to do.

...we must support and protect individuals and companies engaged in life saving medical research

There is no way you're going to have an event like 9/11 and expect things to remain the same. They killed 3,000 people in New York on that day, and if they could have they would've killed 300,000.

Understand the causes of terror? Yes, we should try, but let there be no moral ambiguity about this: nothing could ever justify the events of September 11 and it is to turn justice on its head to pretend it could

What people should understand is that I adore the Labour party.

As I have said throughout, I have no doubt that they will find the clearest possible evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

Examine the legacy that we inherited and what we did. We had boom-and-bust economics and a doubled national debt.

As for those that carried out these attacks there are no adequate words of condemnation. Their barbarism will stand as their shame for all eternity.

It's not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money.

Lord Cranborne told the leader of the opposition to 'back me or sack me' - he succeeded in doing both.

The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It's not big powers going to war with each other. The ravages which fundamentalist political ideology inflicted on the 20th century are memories. The Cold war is over. Europe is at peace, if not always diplomatically.

Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war.

There are millions of young children being educated to a very narrow-minded view of religion. And it's out of that education of large numbers of young people that you then get this extremism.

One of the most important things in politics is you've got to keep your mind infinitely curious and alive to what is happening differently.

I can only go one way. I've not got a reverse gear.

If we are going to carry on growing, and we will, because no country is going to forfeit its right to economic growth, we have to find a way of doing it sustainably.

Fifteen years ago, if you said business will help save the environment people would have laughed at you. Today, I believe that is a serious proposition.

Sometimes it is better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing.

There are people who are anxious about immigration for reasons that are perfectly sensible. They think it's uncontrolled. They think it's, therefore, arbitrary in its consequences, and there are some communities affected much more deeply than others.

Their barbarism will stand as their shame for all eternity.

What I don't know is whether there is a way politically that you can beat away these, some of these populist movements because in the end I don't think they really do provide answers. They ride the anger. But they don't really have the answers. Or whether this is an experiment we're just going to have to go through first.

In government you carry each hope; each disillusion. And in politics it's always about the next challenge.

You've got problems in Central Asia. And you've got problems within our own communities back home. So if we end up saying, look, this has nothing to do with Islam or it's got no connection with that broader question, then we look, frankly, as if we're in denial about the problem. And the interesting thing in the Middle East is that they have absolutely no problem there in identifying that as Islamist extremism and calling it that.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that the intelligence was genuine.

I couldn't live with myself if I thought that these big strategic choices for my generation were there, and I wasn't even making them - or I was making them according to what was expedient rather than what I actually thought was right.

If you're living in a community that's become fragmented and left behind, there's not proper investment in it and so on, in the end, the answer is to make sure that we go and we help those communities, we educate the people properly, we build the necessary infrastructure of support for people.

I didn't come into politics to change the Labour Party. I came into politics to change the country.

I still think the world is better off and safer without Saddam Hussein.

I think it's important for people like me to evaluate and reevaluate.