“I’m back, and you knew I was coming. On my way here I passed a cinema with the sign ‘The Mummy Returns’”

It used to be about trying to do something. Now it’s about trying to be someone.

A week is a long time in politics.

Socialists are happy until they run out of other people’s money.

It pays to know the enemy – not least because at some time you may have the opportunity to turn him into a friend.

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

It’s a funny old world.

I usually make up my mind about a man in ten seconds, and I very rarely change it.

Being Prime Minister is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be: you cannot lead from the crowd.

Freedom will destroy itself if it is not exercised within some sort of moral framework, somebody of shared beliefs, some spiritual heritage transmitted through the Church, the family, and the school.

I wasn’t lucky, I deserved it.

Of course, it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

Don’t follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.

If you can’t afford it, you can’t have it.

The facts of life are conservative.

I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.

If you just set out to be liked, you will be prepared to compromise on anything at any time and would achieve nothing.

The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?

When Fate wills that something should come to pass, she sends forth a million of little circumstances to clear and prepare the way.

For we by conquest, of our soveraine might,And by eternall doome of Fate’s decree,Have wonne the Empire of the Heavens bright.

You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.

It is an awful thing to get a glimpse, as one sometimes does, when the time is past, of some little, little wheel which works the whole mighty machinery of fate, and see how our destinies turn on a minute’s delay or advance.

It lies not in our power to love or hate, for will in us is overruled by fate.