Quotes from Harold MacMillan

You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans: great, big, vulgar, bustling people more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.

I was a sort of son to Ike, and it was the other way round with Kennedy.

It was a storm in a tea cup, but in politics we sail in paper boats.

To be alive at all involves some risk.

It's no use crying over spilt summits.

No man should ever lose sleep over public affairs.

There are three bodies no sensible man directly challenges: the Roman Catholic Church, the Brigade of Guards and the National Union of Mineworkers

I have never found, in a long experience of politics, that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.

It is the duty of Her Majesty's government neither to flap nor to falter.

A man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts.

We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts.

A Foreign Secretary is forever poised between the clich

In long experience I find that a man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts.

I was determined that no British government should be brought down by the action of two tarts.

Most of our people have never had it so good.

The wind of change is blowing through this continent and whether we like it or not, the growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

History is apt to judge harshly those who sacrifice tomorrow for today.

A Foreign Secretaryand this applies also to a prospective Foreign Secretaryis always faced with this cruel dilemma. Nothing he can say can do very much good, and almost anything he may say may do a great deal of harm. Anything he says that is not obvious is dangerous; whatever is not trite is risky. He is forever poised between the cliche and the indiscretion.

As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.

At home you always have to be a politician. When you're abroad you almost feel yourself a statesman.

Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.

Marxism is like a classical building that followed the Renaissance; beautiful in its way, but incapable of growth.