No woman in my time will be Prime Minister or Chancellor or Foreign Secretary--not the top jobs. Anyway I wouldn't want to be Prim...e Minister. You have to give yourself 100%.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One wants in a Prime Minister a good many things, but not very great things. He should be clever but need not be a genius; he shou...ld be conscientious but by no means strait-laced; he should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The differences between the President and the Prime Minister were at least in one respect something more than the obvious differen...ces of national character, education, and even temperament. For all his sense of history, his large, untroubled, easy-going style of life, his unshakable feeling of personal security, his natural assumption of being at home in the great world far beyond the confines of his own country, Roosevelt was a typical child of the twentieth century and of the New World; while Churchill for all his love of the present hour, his unquenchable appetite for new knowledge, his sense of the technological possibilities of our time, and the restless roaming of his fancy in considering how they might be most imaginatively applied, despite his enthusiasm for Basic English, or the siren suit which so upset his hosts in Moscow--despite all this, Churchill remains a European of the nineteenth century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rosalynn said, "Jimmy, if we could only get Prime Minister Begin and President Sadat up here on this mountain for a few days, I be...lieve they might consider how they could prevent another war between their countries." That gave me the idea, and a few weeks later, I invited both men to join me for a series of private talks. In September 1978, they both came to Camp David.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or mar...ried to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits--like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing b...eautiful women, flying thought the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits--involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding--inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitablility of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Vanessa wanted to be a ballerina. Dad had such hopes for her.... Corin was the academically brilliant one, and a fencer of Olympic... standard. Everything was expected of them, and they fulfilled all expectations. But I was the one of whom nothing was expected. I remember a game the three of us played. Vanessa was the President of the United States, Corin was the British Prime Minister--and I was the royal dog.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When Sir Robert Walpole had quitted the administration [as prime minister] in 1742 ... he went to dine with Mr. Lee Warner at Wals...ingham. After dinner a very aged clergyman ... desired to be presented to him, and then told Sir Robert that he had been his first schoolmaster in his infancy ... and had then from his early parts foretold his future greatness ... what an instance of beautiful disinterestedness! ... in twenty years that [Sir Robert's] administration lasted, the honest minister of Walsingham ... had never claimed his scholar, nor let him know of his own existence, till Sir Robert had lost all power of serving him!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »