Quotes by Harold MacMillan

• To be alive at all involves some risk.
• It is the duty of Her Majesty's government neither to flap nor to falter.
• At home, you always have to be a politician; when you're abroad, you almost feel yourself a statesman.
• Marxism is like a classical building that followed the Renaissance; beautiful in its way, but incapable of growth.
• No man should ever lose sleep over public affairs.
• No man succeeds without a good woman behind him. Wife or mother, if it is both, he is twice blessed indeed.
• Once the bear's hug has got you, it is apt to be for keeps.
• It has been said that there is no fool like an old fool, except a young fool. But the young fool has first to grow up to be an old fool to realize what a damn fool he was when he was a young fool.
• There might be 1 finger on the trigger, but there will be 15 fingers on the safety catch.
• It's no use crying over spilt summits.
• Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.
• We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts.
• When the curtain falls, the best thing an actor can do is to go away.
• Power? It's like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.
• A man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts.
• Memorial services are the cocktail parties of the geriatric set.
• 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.
• In long experience I find that a man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts.
• (A Foreign Secretary) is forever poised between the cliche and the indiscretion.
• Britain's most useful role is somewhere between bee and dinosaur.
• He is forever poised between a cliche and an indiscretion.
• I read a great number of press reports and find comfort in the fact that they are nearly always conflicting.
• I was a sort of son to Ike, and it was the other way round with Kennedy.
• I was determined that no British government should be brought down by the action of two tarts.
• If people want a sense of purpose they should get it from their archbishop. They should certainly not get it from their politicians.
• If you don't believe in God, all you have to believe in is decency. Decency is very good. Better decent than indecent. But I don't think it's enough.
• I have never found, in a long experience of politics, that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.