Tony Blair

Yes, I feel I've got something to say. If people want to listen, that's great, and if they don't, that's their choice.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

People know where I stand in the Labour party and what I believe in.

What people should understand is that I adore the Labour party.

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

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.

Look, I am very competitive.

Every so often, I feel I should graduate to classical music, properly. But the truth is, I'm more likely to listen to rock music.

When Europe and America stand together the world is a better and more prosperous place.

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

In Downing Street they called me 'Boss'. Civil servants would always call me 'Prime Minister'.

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.

I cannot think of any circumstances in which a government can go to war without the support of parliament.

I feel like everyone else in this country today. I am utterly devastated.

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.

By nature, I am a unifier. I am a builder of consensus. I don't believe in sloppy compromise. But I do believe in bringing people together.

Genetic modification has many different areas, for example in medicine, and Britain is at the leading edge of this new technology. I don't know, but people tell me, it could indeed by the leading science of the 21st century. All I say to people is: 'Just keep an open mind and let us proceed according to genuine scientific evidence.'

I happen to think it's the politics that makes you electable, but the reason for that is politicians sometimes talk about electability as if it's just a matter of conning the public. Actually, it's a matter of persuading the public, and in my experience, usually, the public gets it right.

My office is on Twitter. I don't tweet myself - at least, not intentionally, but I probably should do.

You know, the media and politicians are always gonna be in a bit of tension with one another and probably most of the time that's healthy and indeed even creative. But it's where - it's really when news organisations are used as kind of instruments of politics that it gets tricky.

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

My faith foundation works to bring about a greater respect and understanding between different faiths. We basically work with six popular religions in the world which are the three Abrahamic religions, Hinduism and Buddhism and Sikhism.

I mean, I went to a church school when I was younger and imbibed a certain amount of religion then but it was really in university that I got interested in religion and politics at the same time. I don't think as if it were one moment of conversion but my spiritual journey really began then.

However much I dislike the idea of abortion, you should not criminalize a woman who, in very difficult circumstances, makes that choice.

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.

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

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

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.

The spread of freedom is the best security for the free.

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.

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

The threat from Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological, potentially nuclear weapons capability - that threat is real.

Sometimes it is better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing.

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

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

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

Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics.

Education is the best economic policy there is.

I can only go one way. I've not got a reverse gear.

Those who wish to cause religious conflict are small in number but often manage to dominate the headline.

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

Be a doer and not a critic.

I have long believed this interdependence defines the new world we live in.

I think the journey for a politician goes from wanting to please all the people all the time, to a political leader that realises in the end his responsibility is to decide. And when he decides, he divides.

I believe Mrs. Thatcher's emphasis on enterprise was right.

In retrospect, the Millennium marked only a moment in time. It was the events of September 11 that marked a turning point in history, where we confront the dangers of the future and assess the choices facing humankind.