Harold Macmillan Short Quotes

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I do not live among young people fairly widely.

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

Harold Macmillan
Power? It's like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.

Harold Macmillan
As Prime Minister sometimes the strain is awful, you have to resort to Jane Austen.

Harold Macmillan
I do not intend to live 'after my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff of younger spirits'.

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

Harold Macmillan
We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts.

Harold Macmillan
On the position of a Foreign Secretary:
Forever poised between a cliché and an indiscretion.

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

Harold Macmillan
At home you always have to be a politician. When you're abroad you almost feel yourself a statesman.

Harold Macmillan
After a long life I have come to the conclusion that when all the establishment is united it is always wrong.

Harold Macmillan
A Foreign Secretary...is always caught by a cruel dilemma—hovering between the cliché and the indiscretion.

Harold Macmillan
What matters is that Mr. Macmillan has let Mr. Lloyd know that at the Foreign Office, in these troubled times, enough is enough.

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
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
To Nikita Khrushchev showing his dissatisfaction by banging his shoe on the desk:
Perhaps we could have a translation, I could not quite follow.

Harold Macmillan
On privatization:
First of all the Georgian silver goes, and then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go.

Harold Macmillan
There are three bodies no sensible man directly challenges: the Roman Catholic Church, the Brigade of Guards and the National Union of Mineworkers.

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
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
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.

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
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.

Harold Macmillan
As an old man he only had nightmares about two things: the trenches in the Great War and what would have happened if the Cuban Missile Crisis had gone wrong.

Harold Macmillan
He [Aneurin Bevan] enjoys prophesying the imminent fall of the capitalist system and is prepared to play a part, any part, in its burial, except that of mute.

Harold Macmillan