Top 784 Tony Blair Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

The huge turnout for Live 8 here and around the world proves that thanks to the leadership from people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown the world is beginning to demand more action on global health and poverty.

I have a nightmare about Tony [Blair] and Gordon [Brown] killing each other. Not every month, but now and then. I also have a recurring dream about losing.

When you consider what Tony Blair was saying about liberty, human rights and that sort of thing, it would be terribly revolutionary to sell the speeches he and Jack Straw made in 1994.

I mean that the time where we need International agreement more than ever on the environment and the rest, poverty we are breaking up our International Institutions and the rule of law and Tony Blair is part of it.

When I started writing the screenplay for 'The Queen,' about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, both Stephen Frears, the director, and Andy Harries, the producer, begged me not to put Tony Blair in it.

It's a very good idea that we have a third term Labour government led by Tony Blair for a full term.

I'm not a political thinker, but I've just always thought of myself as a Labour supporter. I was a great fan of Tony Blair. He sent me a letter before I swam the Channel to wish me luck.

I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad ... he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help.

There was only one punch. Tony Blair rang me and he said 'Are you OK?' and I said 'Yes', and he said 'Well, what happened?' and I said 'I was just carrying out your orders. You told us to connect with the electorate, so I did.

[Macon Blair] wrote a beautiful - once it was kicking off and we were gonna make the movie - he sent me this really beautiful document on Tony [from "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore" ]. It was like ruminations. "Maybe this ... I don't know ..." And I loved it.

Tony Blair is a very able politician; he's perhaps one of the best of his generation. He made a major contribution in many areas, but in Iraq I believe he got it wrong. He got it wrong.

We have a unique relationship with the U.K., Great Britain. Tony Blair has been a steadfast spokesman for Britain, and also for the joint interests that we share.

On Sunday, the president flies to the Azores islands to attend a summit with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar, and here's my prediction: Bush gets voted off.

Tony Blair is one of the most significant world leaders of the modern era. He has a remarkable story to tell. His tenure as prime minister was marked by close relationships with Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, and he enjoys a profile in this country that is rare among foreign leaders.

Christianity doesn't come into it. George Bush and Tony Blair are not Christians. Religious people believe in the prophets, peace be upon them. Bush believes in the profits and how to get a piece of them. So don't ever confuse this with a war of civilizations.

This was absolutely an attack on [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair, principally, and the perspective which is really predominant in Europe right now that he's not questioning enough of Mr. Bush's policies.

As a student, I had stayed with Winston Churchill; later, I had lunched with Harold Macmillan - in fact, had met most of the post-war prime ministers of Great Britain from Douglas-Home to Tony Blair.

My hope that Thatcher would inadvertently bring about a new political revolution was well and truly bogus. All that sprang out of Thatcherism were extreme financialisation, the triumph of the shopping mall over the corner store, the fetishisation of housing and Tony Blair.

I am not the German Tony Blair. Nor am I the German Bill Clinton. I am Gerhard Schroeder, chancellor of Germany, responsible for Germany. I don't want to be a copy of anyone.

I remember when Tony Blair came into office, and there was a sense I was thinking, 'Well, what on Earth am I going to do now?' until I realized that's exactly what he was thinking.

Tony Blair has made a good contribution to the cause of peace in Ireland. He has made a great effort to understand it. He has great empathy with the need to resolve the conflict.

The only option to avoid war is the departure of the number one warmonger in the world US President George W Bush. His policy has brought disaster to the United States. This crazy man should go and also his subject, disciple and follower UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Tony Blair has always said he will be judged by history. Now Alastair Campbell is history we await his judgment.

Sometimes Jonathan [Powell] and myself would go to Tony [Blair] and ask him if he was absolutely sure about this or that. That was our job. But ultimately it was his decision.

Beginning with the Clinton Administration and rapidly accelerating with the George W. Bush and Obama regimes and Tony Blair in England, the U.S. and U.K. governments have run roughshod over their accountability to law.

The only time I penetrated Tony Blair's defenses over Iraq was by keeping eye contact while telling him he never seemed to by sorry

He [Tony Blair] was always ambivalent about the [Rupert] Murdoch papers. But he gave other papers the chance to believe it was just about 'The Independent.' And that was wrong.

Overall his period in office can only be characterised as a decade of missed opportunities in which the hopes of the British people for a new kind of politics were shattered [on Tony Blair]

In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.

I don't think the Republicans would appreciate the comparison, but they're exactly like the Labor Party in England in the 1970s. They're letting their extremists take them straight down. The same thing is going to happen - they had to disappear for a while and when they reinvented themselves they did it with moderates, they did it with Tony Blair.

When I was growing up in the early noughties, I remember the time being very serene, peaceful and innocent. But actually there was Tony Blair's oil wars going on halfway across the world.

Tony Blair adopted the accent of the audience he was speaking to, which worked very well initially, but then voters began to perceive him as phoney. The 'man of the people' act is the height of condescension.

I think there were times when, if circumstances had developed, I might have been tempted into politics. I am a fan of Tony Blair. I think Gordon Brown is a fine man, but I think he's headed for one hell of a bloody struggle.

...The British press... [claimed that Tony] Blair was simply Bush's poodle - a favorite phrase, bewilderingly popular, although it made no sense - and that he was ignoring the will of the British people. Considering the hacks had spent Blair's first six years in office condemning him for relying on focus groups and opinion polls for his policies - in other words, paying attention to nothing but the will of the people, or at least their whims - that seemed a little rich to me, but as I said, logical consistency has never figured highly in the British media's scale of values.

Gordon Brown is a character from a tragic opera, twisted by ambition and a Presbyterian sense of fateful destiny. He has waited 13 years, mostly in Tony Blair's shadow, for this poisoned chalice and has a pessimist's luck.

For all that the papers would say I was a liar, I took the words I was saying at briefings as seriously as Tony Blair took what he would say at the Despatch Box. I find it very difficult not to tell the truth. I felt I was accountable for what I said.

I would say Tony Blair is very much a lapdog. I'm terribly scared that when he finally goes - and we can only hope it's soon - that he will be remembered for all these terrible things that he's done. Which is kind of a scary thing for a Labor Prime Minister.

I do think it's strange that I get associated with Iraq more than the people who were Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary. It's because of my closeness to Tony [Blair], which I don't regret at all. I think that was a privilege.

I used to think that the British press were particularly awful to Cherie Blair. I think Blair's foreign policy was a complete disaster, but the British press, when they wanted to explain why Blair took unexpected moves, they did create Cherie as the power behind the throne.

When I first met Tony Blair in 1996, he was open and idealistic, keen to bring a breath of fresh air to government. But something happened - was it just the arrogance of power? - that narrowed Labour's vision from purposeful reform and investment, to peevish and petulant pragmatism.

I know people have tried to make citizens' arrests on Tony Blair and so on, but really it's time the international criminal court has some guts and charges white war criminals. They need to face justice just like other war criminals.

For good or for ill, Britain is in some respects moving away from a prime-ministerial system towards a presidential one. This is emphatically not, as is sometimes argued, simply a function of Tony Blair's personal ambition. The shift towards a more presidential style was already visible under Margaret Thatcher.

I think politicians should express their faith. I have never adhered to the Blair view that we don't do God, indeed I'm not sure that Blair does.

Is Tony Blair of the Labour party? The answer to that is profoundly 'yes', but that is not how, sentimentally, he is regarded in the Labour movement generally.

I hesitated, too, because for better or worse, I have been one of the principal architects of New Labour and I have worked closely with Tony Blair and the team for nearly 20 years.

I think Tony Blair has to come down on one side or the other. You can't be a half-hearted supporter of the possible attack on Iraq. You're either with George Bush or you're against him.

George Bush Junior [George W Bush] was a religious fanatic, and Tony Blair wasn't far behind in a way.

My journalistic mission was straightforward: to await the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Nobody knew quite when this would be. But the diplomacy - the meetings in the U.N. security council, the allegations about weapons of mass destruction, the martial language of Tony Blair and George W. Bush - all suggested a war was brewing.

As a matter of fact, the African Union itself estimated that every year corruption alone costs Africa $148 billion. If African leaders could cut that in half, they'll find more money than what Tony Blair is trying to raise for them.

If I was to say what I am, I'd be a Labour man. I like Tony Blair a lot, I think he's a good man. And in America I'd definitely be a Democrat; I'd never be a Republican.

Both Bush as well, as Tony Blair, are undermining an idea which was sponsored by their predecessors. They do not care. Is it because the secretary-general of the United Nations [Ghanaian Kofi Annan] is now a black man? They never did that when secretary-generals were white.

What we want to do is reform the welfare system in the way that Tony Blair talked about 13 years ago but never achieved - a system that was created for the days after the Second World War. That prize is now I think achievable.

Tony Blair faced a massive defection from his own party ranks during voting around the intervention in Iraq. For our present purpose, the point is not that he survived the defection, but that he had to face it.

The internet makes it much easier for politicians to communicate directly with voters - think of the interest when David [Cameron] launched WebCameron, or Tony Blair's rather embarrassing attempt to catch up on YouTube.

When you look at the things people are really fed up with, like the collapse of the pension system, like the failure to get money to the frontline of the health service, Gordon Brown is more responsible for that than any other politician including Tony Blair

Tony Blair is a dreadful man; really truly dreadful.

Tony Blair will be remembered for nothing other than that he followed George W. Bush over a cliff; took the rest of us with them, and we haven't yet reached the bottom, I'm afraid.

My guess is that good and bad parenting is spread fairly evenly across different social groups. But can you imagine Tony Blair lecturing the middle class on how to bring up their children? He is far more comfortable as a latter-day exponent of the Poor Law mentality.

Tony Blair has turned his back on the principles he claimed he believed in before he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with George W. Bush. He was an entirely different kind of leader.

One minute you're up a mountain, the next you're down a well. One minute you're with Tony Blair, the next you're with McFly. Ten years feels like two years when you're in the 'Blue Peter' bubble.