Top 160 Quotes & Sayings by Gordon Brown - Page 2

If people are persuaded of the need for education and the need to invest in education, they're also persuaded of the need not to waste that investment by having low-quality education but to have high-quality education.

Almost certainly, my ancestors had travelled by sea from Sweden to England in search of prosperity, and the evidence suggests they left Sweden around the ninth or 10th centuries.

Our ability to connect as a nation with other nations around the world is enhanced dramatically by the Internet.

If you take energy and climate change, you really cannot deal with the problems with energy and climate change without European co-operation at a high level. If you take digitalisation, it's an obvious area where European co-operation can actually make a difference.

While you cannot deliver policies without principles, you cannot deliver principles without having power. You have quickly to move to a stage where, emphasising your principles, you build a programme, then call for popular support.

I don't believe that any prime minister would send our troops into conflict without the assurance from the military that they had the equipment necessary for the operation.

Those who write off our European heritage are, at least in part, writing off their own heritage.

If you look at the question of expenditure in Iraq, you have got to start from the one fundamental truth: that every request that the military commanders made to us for equipment was answered. No request was ever turned down.

People have now got the ability to speak to each other across continents: to join with each other in communities that are not based simply on territory, streets, but networks; and you've got the possibility of people building alliances right across the world.

Collective European Union action could mean no hiding places for evaders, no safe haven for tax avoiders, and no treasure islands for money launderers.

To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots.

I think it's important that people know who you are and... can ask any questions they like about you.

It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present.

Every country is going to have to face up to globalisation, but Scotland has got a unique capacity because of its history as part of a multinational state to help us deal with that problem.

Let us think of ourselves not as 'yes' and 'no' Scots but simply as Scots, and let us be a nation, united again.

I am a father with young kids, and you want to know the jobs in the future are going to be there.

It is not a mistake to want power.

Britain must lead in Europe to intensify the fight against global terrorism and make our country safer.

You can drink too much tea.

You can't just vote for yourself. All the time, you're thinking what sort of country, what world, what future?

To make Europe more effective is a worthwhile objective. To make Europe less important in your calculations is a big mistake.

You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on, and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken.

I find it quite unusual for people to criticise me for doing what I consider to be my duty.

I believe that our vote is both a public duty and a sacred trust.

When things are difficult, you have to be sure of who you are and what you want to achieve.

While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him.

I'm all for greater co-operation between Europe and America because I think that sometimes we've missed out on the benefits that transatlantic trade could give both continents, and I've been pressing this since 1997.

The best way of realising our high ideals is to show that we have an alternative in government that is credible, that is radical, and is electable - is neither a pale imitation of what the Tories offer nor is it the route to being a party of permanent protest rather than a party of government.

Foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites.

I have to say that if our global alliances are going to be alliances with Hezbollah and Hamas and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and Vladimir Putin's Russia, there is absolutely no chance of building a world-wide alliance that can deal with poverty and inequality and climate change and financial instability, and we've got to face up to that fact.

For centuries, individuals have been learning how to live with their next-door neighbours.

We've managed to find a way of making decisions that prevents conflict arising - there has been no war between European members at any point in the last 70 years.

Famously, I'm somewhat impatient.

I've got a job to do.

Meet the challenges of the time.

Making the desirable possible requires us to make the desirable popular, electable, credible, and something that people want to hold on to.

When people criticise you, you've got to listen to that criticism, and to learn from it, which I've tried to do.

Cowdenbeath Football Club have always been at the centre of Cowdenbeath - literally and in every aspect of community life.

Nigel Farage wanted to privatise the health service. Nigel Farage does not believe in the values we believe in for our public services.

I once wrote a book on courage and what made people courageous. I found it was a strength of belief matched by a strength of willpower.

I think fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers - we should look at what young people are saying to us.

I had to deal with terrorist finance. And we had to, if you like, ensure that the accounts of people who were guilty of terrorist finance or using their accounts for terrorist finance were closed down. So we had to do asset freezing.

I did maths for a year at university. I don't think I was very good at it. And some people would say it shows.

We had lost the art of communication - but not, alas, the gift of speech.

Our new economic approach is rooted in ideas which stress the importance of macro-economics, post neo-classical endogenous growth theory and the symbiotic relationships between growth and investment, and people and infrastructure.

Britain does not want a return to boom and bust.

Rigorous financial discipline that, together with monetary stability, ends once and for all the boom and bust that for 30 years has undermined stability

No one should be held back from realising their potential by fears that they will not be able to afford to go to university or that they will graduate with unmanageable levels of debt.

When the strong help the weak, it makes us all stronger

Under this Government, Britain will not return to the boom and bust of the past.

My favourite sport at school was rugby. All sports are teamwork, but rugby particularly is about teamwork and I think teamwork is the essence of this.

Sometimes it takes a crisis for people to agree that what is obvious and should have been done years ago, can no longer be postponed. We must create a new international financial architecture for the global age.

There is a golden thread which runs through British history of the individual, standing firm against tyranny and then of the individual participating in his society

Indeed, Britain was set to repeat the old, familiar cycle of boom and bust. Since then, we have created and rigorously adhered to a new framework of modern economic management

To be a teacher you must be a prophet - because you are trying to prepare people for a world thirty to fifty years into the future.

I take full responsibility for what happened. That's why the person who was responsible went immediately.

The next election will be a flyweight versus a heavyweight. However much the right hon. Gentleman [David Cameron] may dance around the ring beforehand, at some point, he will come within the reach of a big clunking fist...

David Blunkett and I both take the same view that it is scandalous that someone from North Tyneside, Laura Spence, with the best qualifications and who wants to be a doctor, should be turned down by Oxford University using an interview system more reminiscent of the old school network and the old school tie than justice. It is about time for an end to that old Britain where what matters more are the privileges you are born with, rather than the potential you actually have.

The vision of personalised public services - meeting the individual needs of all our citizens - requires continuing reform in the way services are delivered

What has become clear is that Britain cannot trust the Conservatives to run the economy. Everyone knows that I'm all in favour of apprenticeships, but let me tell you this is no time for a novice.