Harold Macmillan Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

The sale of assets is common with individuals and states when they run into financial difficulties. First, all the Georgian silver goes, and then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go.

Harold Macmillan
The Whips want the safe men…I reminded Winston again that it took Hitler to make him PM and me an under-secretary. The Tory Party would do neither.

Harold Macmillan
When asked to identify the greatest challenge for a statesman:
Events, my dear boy, events.

Harold Macmillan
It is thinking about themselves that is really the curse of the younger generation—they appear to have no other subject which interests them at all.

Harold Macmillan
I have never found in a long experience of politics that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.

Harold Macmillan
We…are Greeks in this American empire…We must run the Allied Forces HQ as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.
To Richard crossman in 1944

Harold Macmillan
Churchill was fundamentally what the English call unstable—by which they mean anybody who has that touch of genius which is inconvenient in normal times.

Harold Macmillan
It is always a matter of regret from the personal point of view when divergences arise between colleagues, but it is the team that matters and not the individual, and I am quite happy about the strength and the power of the team, and so I thought the best thing to do was to settle up these little local difficulties, and then turn to the wider vision of the Commonwealth.

Harold Macmillan
It's a good thing to be laughed at. It's better than to be ignored.

Harold Macmillan
If people want a sense of purpose, they should get it from their archbishops. They should not hope to receive it from their politicians.

Harold Macmillan
Can we say that with fifteen representatives, Ambassadors or Ministers, in Nato acting in unanimity, the deterrent would continue to be credible? There might be one finger on the trigger. There would be fifteen fingers on the safety catch.

Harold Macmillan
So there you are – you can see what it is like. The camera's hot, probing eye, these monstrous machines and their attendants – a kind of twentieth century torture chamber, that's what it is. But I must try to forget about that, and imagine that you are sitting here in the room with me.

Harold Macmillan
Let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you'll see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime—nor indeed ever in the history of this country. What is beginning to worry some of us is 'Is it too good to be true?' or perhaps I should say 'Is it too good to last?'

Harold Macmillan