Words matter. These are the best David Miliband Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Today, Labour has a disruptive economic narrative – that Britain needs fundamental change in its market structure and culture to compete in the modern world.
The two biggest threats to international security in 2013 are Iran getting a nuclear weapon, and Iran being bombed to stop it getting a nuclear weapon. Both would precipitate a long and dangerous conflict in an already unstable Middle East. Both would be a disaster.
John Major put the ‘er’ back into Conservative, David Cameron’s put the ‘Con’ into Conservative – and Norman Lamont put the ‘vat’ into Conservative!
I was always brought up that if you can make a difference, you should, and if you don’t it’s a waste. So we’ll see if I can make a difference.
You have to believe that it’s through politics that societies can lead social and economic and political change.
Communism was meant to be an alternative religion.
I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for ‘history.’ The closest word for it is memory.
And the truth is, those who are terrorists only have to succeed once, and those of us who are trying to build an inclusive society have to succeed every time.
People feel politics isn’t about their lives.
History is information. Memory is part of your identity.
My advice is very simple: if you can win a small battle, it gives you confidence in the political process to take on bigger battles, and so it is very much a bottom-up grass-roots way of doing politics.
You know, you only get to live life once, so there are two things that that yields. One is that there’s no point in crying over spilt milk, but secondly you hate wasting time, energy, and whatever talent you’ve got.
People want more power over their own lives. That’s not just true in Britain, it’s true around the world.
But for me, my personal relations, my personal family relations, are very important, and we’ve always tried to make sure that the public and the private are kept separate.
The real danger to Britain is a foreign policy that is isolationist in Europe and therefore weak in the rest of the world.
The whole of government needs to contribute to the shared goal of restructuring the British economy. But that means taking on the myth that the Treasury either knows best or can run it all. It just doesn’t.
In the end, human history is made up of all our decisions.
I’ve learnt that, sometimes, how others see you is not the same as how you see yourself. I’ve learnt about how you can be multitasking – and sometimes other people see that you’re multitasking. And that’s not very nice for them.
Israelis and Palestinians are suspicious of each other and of promises from outside. But the need for a negotiated solution between the parties should not stymie international clarity and consensus about the endgame in terms of borders and other issues.
Successful economies in the modern world are not sheepish about the power and responsibility of the state.
We keep the terrorist threat to the United Kingdom under very careful scrutiny. We think it’s right to keep the public informed about the general threat level.
What is the big political issue for Britain at the moment? Without wishing to sound portentous, it is about whether we can build a social democratic settlement, whether we can lay the political and cultural foundations for the next several years.
My favourite poem is called ‘Roots and Wings’ – it’s a very moving poem about how if you’ve got real roots you can fly.
The wedding ring on my left hand was bought by my grandfather, Samuel Miliband, in Brussels in 1920. I never knew him, as he died when I was one. But his ring was kept by my aunt until it was placed on my finger by my wife Louise 32 years later.
The test of leadership for David Cameron was actually to bring the British Conservative Party back in to the mainstream.
The American idea that everyone graduates high school at 18 is a good one.
I can’t admit to myself that the creation of a Palestinian state won’t happen. What I know is that with each passing year it gets more and more difficult to happen, not least because there is more and more bloodshed, generation upon generation.
The biggest novelty of 2013 will be new leadership in China. Very little is known about the views of the new leaders – who will rule the country for ten years. But we do know they’re the first generation of Chinese leaders who have spent the majority of their lives in a China ‘opening up’ to the rest of the world.
Foreign policy is inseparable from domestic policy now. Is terrorism foreign policy or domestic policy? It’s both. It’s the same with crime, with the economy, climate change.
In Britain, the centrally prescribed welfare to work system short-changes the young unemployed. Transport, housing and education are over centralised.
