Tony Blair Quotes
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Sometimes people say to me, 'Well, what was the difference between Kosovo, which was a successful intervention, and Iraq and Afghanistan that have been so difficult?' And the answer is perfectly simple. In Kosovo, you have, after the removal of the loss of its regime, you had a process of political and economic reconstruction that took its part without the intervention of terrorism. If you had the intervention of terrorism, by the way, it would have been extremely difficult there - but we didn't.
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So actually I only got a mobile phone the day after I left being Prime Minister.
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The understanding which has driven New Labour's reform is to put the individual citizen - the patient, the parent, the pupil, the law abiding citizen - at the centre of each public service, with the service reformed to meet their individual requirements
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The jolt that Tony Blair received 35,000ft above the Pacific Ocean was not normal turbulence.
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Our task is not to fight old battles, but to show that there is a third way, a way of marrying together an open competitive society and successful economy with a just and decent society.
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We have a situation where we are rich really as a world overall, and yet we have the capacity to destroy ourselves, either through nuclear weapons or through environmental degradation, and we allow the life chances of hundreds of millions of people to be destroyed because we haven't found the will to tackle it
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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.
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One thing I'm not sure of - and it's a very open question - is whether the type of politics that I represent really has had its day or not. Now I obviously believe passionately it hasn't, that it's still the answer and not the problem, and, you know, the evidence points both ways.
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I think we've, again, got to be extremely careful; otherwise we'll misunderstand what's going on in Iraq and in Syria today. Of course, you can't say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.
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Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. Conform to it; or don't come here.
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I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that the intelligence was genuine.
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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.
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As the world transforms, moves closer together, jobs are displaced, and the world of work completely changes the way we live, the way we think. As that revolution goes on around us, it is going to pose political challenges of which immigration is one very obvious one, which are going to be extremely difficult to deal with. But it's like free trade. You know, in the end, if we go protectionist, we'll make a mistake.
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The appalling details of the campaign of intimidation - which include grave-robbing - show the depths to which the animal extremists are prepared to stoop.
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If you've got communities that feel they've been left behind, if you've got - as you do in Britain at the moment, you have communities that believe they're being changed by immigration, that they don't have job opportunities, and that they're disregarded and that they don't - they've got no stake in a future which embraces globalization, you've got to address that issue.
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I think the journey for a politician goes from wanting to please all the people all the time, to a political leader that realises in the end his responsibility is to decide. And when he decides, he divides.
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We promise that the events of 1991 will not happen again. We have pledged to remove Saddam. And we will deliver.
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A lot of the politics that is going on left and right at the moment is more about a protest, which we should respond to. It's not often about a policy. And that's why what you get is this strange coalition of different views of what the future should be, coming together in alliance to protest against the status quo.
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There are two outstanding issues in democratic politics these days. One is the relationship with the media, which is now 24/7, and operates with a completely different intensity than even 15 or 20 years ago. How do we have a proper conversation between leaders and country when it's moderated sometimes in a very partisan and inflammatory way? And the second thing is the effectiveness of our democracy. How do we get the right gene and talent pool in politics?
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Those who wish to cause religious conflict are small in number but often manage to dominate the headline.
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It is not an arrogant government that chooses priorities, it's an irresponsible government that fails to choose.
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Make the wrong choices now and future generations will live with a changed climate, depleted resources and without the green space and biodiversity that contribute both to our standard of living and our quality of life
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When my parents were growing up the world's population was under three billion. During my children's lifetime, it is likely to exceed nine billion. You don't need to be an expert to realise that sustainable development is going to become the greatest challenge we face this century
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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.