Tony Blair Quotes
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I always say, when they ask me about American politics, is for you guys to decide who you elect.
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I think it's important for people like me to evaluate and reevaluate.
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I also, as I think most people do, have a healthy instinct that if we upset the balance of nature, we are in all probability going to suffer a reaction. With world growth, and population as it is, this reaction must increase.
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Obviously it is right that the Afghans take responsibility for their own future in the end, but they need to know and feel that we are there as partners for them if they are prepared to make the necessary changes. But we should be in no doubt as to why we are in Afghanistan. We ended up there because terrorism hatched there erupted thousands of miles away in New York on Sept. 11.
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It the intelligence service concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population; and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability.
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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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I don't like it, to be honest, when politicians make a big thing of their religious beliefs, so I don't make a big thing of it.
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I think crime is a huge issue for people. If you were living in the poorest state, and you've got drug dealers at the end of the street, and your life's in misery, and you're afraid of your kids going out the door. I mean, the job of progressive politicians is to do something about that.
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Genetic modification has many different areas, for example in medicine, and Britain is at the leading edge of this new technology. I don't know, but people tell me, it could indeed by the leading science of the 21st century. All I say to people is: 'Just keep an open mind and let us proceed according to genuine scientific evidence.'
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I think what happened with 9/11 is that people sort of felt that it came from nowhere. Whereas I think now we understand the roots are very deep. I say it's like revolutionary Communism, something that is going to have to be knocked out over a very long period of time. This strain of extremism continues to be very strong, whether it's in Afghanistan, or Somalia or Yemen, or any of these places.
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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.
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Climate change is the world's greatest environmental challenge. It is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialization and economic growth...is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable.
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I think people think their incomes have been flat lining for a long period of time. They feel that the next generation's opportunities are not going to be improvement. So and I also think that social media then allows insurgent movements to gain scale at speed.
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If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive.
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Terrorism brings the reprisal; the reprisal brings the additional hatred; the additional hatred breeds the additional terrorism, and so on.
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I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honour, but sometimes it is the price of leadership and the cost of conviction.
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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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The problem is some of the populism on both the far left and the far right, it can make a Tweet but not make a policy. And, you know, when you are dealing with issues that are as important and serious as this, I understand why people search for simple solutions.
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Surely we have the wit and will to develop economically without despoiling the very environment we depend upon
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Terrorist threats are not happening just in this country, but in every European country and every country across the globe. As a result of that, we do sometimes have to take measures we would rather not take in order to give us the security we need.
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Stirring is OK. It just depends what happens in the end.
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We are going to expand enormously -- our economy, our consumption, over the years to come ... But the consequences of that on emissions are going to be severe unless we change direction.
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If you are trying to take a difficult decision and you're weighing up the pros and cons, you have frank conversations. Everybody knows this in their walk of life.
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I think the people like myself who are in the center ground of politics and who think that center left and center right can cooperate and work together. Who don't like this sort of insurgent populism because we think it's not really going to deliver for the people, I think there's a big responsibility on us in the center to get our act together. And to work out radical but serious solutions to the problems people face.