John Major Quotes

The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare.

John Major

• Long
• Game
• Patience

Something I was not aware had happened suddenly turned out not to have happened.

John Major

Well, I think there's a distinction between sexing-up the intelligence and sexing-up the presentation of the intelligence.

John Major

• Up

I think we can get respect for Parliament back providing governments and oppositions are frank.

John Major

• Respect

I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.

John Major

• Time
• Long

I don't have a shred of regret about entering the exchange-rate mechanism.

John Major

• Regret

Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, 'Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist' and, if we get our way, Shakespeare will still be read even in school.

John Major

• Long
• Country
• School

Whether you agree with me or disagree with me; like me or loathe me, don't bind my hands when I am negotiating on behalf of the British nation.

John Major

Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be too clever by half. The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.

John Major

• People
• Stupid
• Clever

I have a huge admiration for the House of Lords, I have a huge admiration for the people who work in the House of Lords, they're great public servants and they do an absolutely tremendous job.

John Major

• People
• Work
• Great

My father was 64 when I was conceived, my mother 38, which was late for babies in the 1940s.

John Major

• Mother
• Father

I think the biggest mistake I made was this wretched ability to see both sides of an argument.

John Major

• Mistake

If you look at things that really affect people's lives - sport, the arts, charities - they were always at the back of the queue for government money - health, social security, defence, pensions were all way ahead. And each of those areas - sports, the arts, the lottery - got relatively petty cash from the government.

John Major

• People
• Money
• Health

Let's turn British inventions into British industries, British factories and British jobs. Let them make pounds for us, not dollars marks or yen for others.

John Major

If we want to deliver opportunity for all, we need an economy that delivers jobs for the future.

John Major

• Future
• Opportunity

Of course there are regrets. I shall regret always that I found my own authentic voice in politics. I was too conservative, too conventional. Too safe, too often. Too defensive. Too reactive. Later, too often on the back foot.

John Major

• Regret

In the next ten years we will have to continue to make changes which will make the whole of this country a genuinely classless society.

John Major

• Country
• Society

We Conservatives have always passed our values from generation to generation. I believe that personal prosperity should follow the same course. I want to see wealth cascading down the generations. We do not see each generation starting out anew, with the past cut off and the future ignored.

John Major

• Believe
• Future
• Past

There are more myths about Black Wednesday than the Greeks ever created.

John Major

• Black
• Wednesday

My mother was the center of the family.

John Major

• Family
• Mother

When the euro was born, it was born in the wrong economic circumstances.

John Major

Certainly we've seen the enormous changes across the whole of the Middle East. The democratic genie is out of the bottle.

John Major

I think it's extremely unlikely that the European Union will fracture with nations dropping off the edge.

John Major

A consensus politician is someone who does something that he doesn't believe is right because it keeps people quiet when he does it.

John Major

• People
• Believe