John Major Quotes
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I mean if you have ever found a politician who says, 'No, no, I would do everything exactly as I did,' then you can tell when he is lying because his lips are moving.
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Well, I think there's a distinction between sexing-up the intelligence and sexing-up the presentation of the intelligence.
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When I was in office the fundraising was done by the party treasurers.
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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.
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Something I was not aware had happened suddenly turned out not to have happened.
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I don't have a shred of regret about entering the exchange-rate mechanism.
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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.
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I think we can get respect for Parliament back providing governments and oppositions are frank.
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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.
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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.
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My father was 64 when I was conceived, my mother 38, which was late for babies in the 1940s.
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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.
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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.
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If we want to deliver opportunity for all, we need an economy that delivers jobs for the future.
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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.
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Certainly we've seen the enormous changes across the whole of the Middle East. The democratic genie is out of the bottle.
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A consensus politician is someone who does something that he doesn't believe is right because it keeps people quiet when he does it.
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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.
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There are more myths about Black Wednesday than the Greeks ever created.
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The politician who never made a mistake never made a decision.
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My mother was the center of the family.
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I inherited a sick economy and passed on a sound one. But one abiding regret for me is that, in between, I did not have the resources to put in place the educational and social changes about which I cared to much; I made only a beginning, and it was not enough.
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I think the biggest mistake I made was this wretched ability to see both sides of an argument.
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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.