Quotes By Tony Blair

The public think the politicians don't know or care about their lives; and the politicians feel misunderstood.

You only require two things in life: your sanity and your wife.

Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war.

Values unrelated to modern reality are not just electorally hopeless, the values themselves become devalued. They have no purchase on the real world.

I say to the Taliban: surrender the terrorists; or surrender power. It's your choice.

We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world.

Our new world rests on order. The danger is disorder. And in today's world, it can now spread like contagion.

But I am an optimist about Britain; and the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is not that the optimist believes the world is wonderful and the pessimist believes it's beset by challenges; the difference is the pessimist believes we will be defeated by them; the optimist thinks the challenges can be overcome.

I would've loved to have been in a band, but sadly I just wasn't good enough.

The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It's not big powers going to war with each other. The ravages which fundamentalist political ideology inflicted on the 20th century are memories. The Cold war is over. Europe is at peace, if not always diplomatically.

Leaders lead but in the end it's the people who deliver.

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.

And just as the terrorist seeks to divide humanity in hate, so we have to unify it around an idea. And that idea is liberty.

In no relationship at the top of any walk of life is it always easy, least of all in politics which matters so much and which is conducted in such a piercing spotlight.

My dad was a militant atheist, or is a militant atheist. My mum was sort of bought up in a religious family because she was a Protestant from Ireland but wasn't especially religious.

Labour is the party of law and order in Britain today. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

The great advantage of the Lib Dems is precisely that no-one knows what they stand for.

There is no way you're going to have an event like 9/11 and expect things to remain the same. They killed 3,000 people in New York on that day, and if they could have they would've killed 300,000.

So actually I only got a mobile phone the day after I left being Prime Minister.

Once his wife goes to sleep it takes a minor nuclear explosion to wake her.

The purpose of terrorism lies not just in the violent act itself. It is in producing terror. It sets out to inflame, to divide, to produce consequences which they then use to justify further terror.

Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile. This is a party of government, and I will lead it as a party of government.

The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes.

But the world is ever more interdependent. Stock markets and economies rise and fall together. Confidence is the key to prosperity. Insecurity spreads like contagion. So people crave stability and order.

My view is that you still, in order to win from the Labour perspective, have to have a strong alliance with business as well as the unions. You have got to be very much in the centre ground on things like public sector reform.

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.

But as I always say to people I'm essentially a public service person.

Look, I am very competitive.

Whatever the dangers of the action we take, the dangers of inaction are far, far greater.

In April 1991, after the Gulf war, Iraq was given 15 days to provide a full and final declaration of all its WMD.