“Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism – that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous.”

My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.

It was the kind of blind, gulping, insensate greed that you associate with some milk-eyed creature in a volcanic fissure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench-an organism with no understanding of the existence, let alone the feelings, of other members of the ecosystem.

This is not a time to quail, it is not a crisis, nor should we see it as an excuse for wobbling or self-doubt. But it is a moment for hope.

I have not been more robust towards female rather than male assembly members and I do not believe I have been remotely sexist.

London is a fantastic creator of jobs – but many of these jobs are going to people who don’t originate in this country.

The next Tory leader would have to unify his party and ensure that Britain stood tall in the world.

Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity.

I have as much chance of becoming Prime Minister as of being decapitated by a frisbee or of finding Elvis.

I think it’d be disgraceful if a chap wasn’t allowed to have a bit of fun in Las Vegas. The real scandal would be if you went to Vegas and you didn’t misbehave in some trivial way.

I’d like thousands of schools as good as the one I went to, Eton.

Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix and stay conscious.

My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg.

He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette, and who now decides to double up by betting the house as well.

Can I say anything good about Ken Livingstone? A long time ago he did some good things, but I can’t now remember what any of them were.

I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad … he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help.

The difference between Hitler’s speeches and Churchill’s speeches was that Hitler made you think he could do anything; Churchill made you think you could do anything.

Politics is enthusiasm with a collective; with love, two people. So love is the minimal form of communism.

Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.

Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity

[I]n communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

Demagoguery and populism are rampant. We are the illegitimate children, the bastards of communism. It shaped our mentality.

After the fall of communism in Poland, we had a post-communist as president for two terms: Aleksander Kwasniewski. He was very good. He brought Poland into NATO and the European Union.

There is not Communism or Marxism, but representative democracy and social justice in a well-planned economy.

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.