Chris Patten Quotes

Multilateralism is not an easy option. We're going to find that the world is very difficult. And relationships between America and the rest of the world are very difficult.

It'd make a wonderful change to have the leader of a pluralist democracy who acted on that, who told people just how tough things are going to be, just what's going to have to be done - and, maybe, ran all the risks on the side of honesty, rather than spinning stories and trying to win the headlines every day.

You don't have to wait until people say they accept everything you say until you are actually prepared to sit down and discuss matters with them.

I think that if politics is just about getting your backside on important seats, then it's a pretty worthless endeavor.

It is curious that atheists have proved to be so intolerant of those who have a faith.

I believe in trying to get a balance between individual freedom on the one hand and social responsibility on the other.

It behaves more like a tribe than a democratic institution ... responding to custom rather than reason and using its own liturgy and language for the conduct of its domestic affairs.

There is a sort of exotic preposterousness about a lot of elections, the way arguments are made even cruder.

In a democracy everybody has a right to be represented, including the jerks.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

It is almost always wrong that the time isn't ripe to decide something. That is always said of difficult problems.

We're not trying to recreate Yugoslavia

I don't think that capitalism should be unbridled, if by 'unbridled' you mean unregulated.

It is a sort of great Victorian truth that actually, trying to do the right thing is pretty good for you and pretty good for business as well, by and large.

Anyone who supposed that when Margaret Thatcher left Number Ten she was going to take a Trappist vow did not know that formidable politician.

Undoubtedly, at the moment, the major cause of CO2 emission is what happens in developed countries.

Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off.

In democracy everyone has the right to be represented, even the jerks.

All parts of the society need to feel that the police service is their police service, and that does not happen unless all parts of society are represented in the police