Anthony Eden Quotations

It is a common happening that those in power, as their tenure of office continues, find themselves less and less able to contemplate relinquishing it.

The more the planners, the worse the plans.

All prejudices are equally fatal to good government.

Long experience has told me that to be criticized is not always to be wrong.

Responding to the question "If Mr. Stalin dies, what will be the effect on international affairs?" That is a good question for you to ask, not a wise question for me to answer.

We have many times led Europe in the fight for freedom. It would be an ignoble end to our long history if we tamely accepted to perish by degrees.

We best avoid wars by taking even physical action to stop small ones.

Every succeeding scientific discovery makes greater nonsense of old-time conceptions of sovereignty.

We are not at war with Egypt. We are in an armed conflict.

Although [in 1937] we might still hope to prevent the divisions of Europe into Fascist and anti-Fascist camps, our real affinities and interests, strategic as well as political, lay with France, a fact which some of my colleagues were most reluctant to realise.

Eden ha[s] put his country in a position where she sustained the greatest diplomatic reverse since Bismarck in similar circumstances had called Palmerston's bluff in the matter of Schleswig-Holstein...Further damage was done when Russia proved by her action in Spain, that she was not a good European as Mr. Eden had assured the world was the case.

Anthony's father was a mad baronet and his mother a very beautiful woman. That's Anthony-half mad baronet, half beautiful woman.

The free world has need that its foreign policies should fairly measure the realities of the world in which we live. There are certain principles to which we hold: the sanctity of treaties, good faith between nations, the interdependence of peoples from which no country, however powerful, can altogether escape.

Drift is the demon of democracy.

Our quarrel is not with Egypt, still less with the Arab world. It is with Colonel Nasser. He has shown that he is not a man who can be trusted to keep an agreement. Now he has torn up all his country's promises to the Suez Canal Company and has even gone back on his own statements.

Man should be master of his environment, not its slave. That is what freedom means.

Everyone is always in favour of general economy and particular expenditure.

The worst of being sacked is you can never find your car.

No democratic world will work as it should work until we recognize that we can only enjoy any right so long as we are prepared to discharge its equivalent duty. This applies just as much to states in their dealing with one another as to individuals within the states.

Corruption never has been compulsory.

If we had allowed things to drift, everything would have gone from bad to worse. Nasser would have become a kind of Moslem Mussolini, and our friends in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and even Iran would gradually have been brought down. His efforts would have spread westwards, and Libya and North Africa would have been brought under his control.

You may gain temporary appeasement by a policy of concession to violence, but you do not gain lasting peace that way.

Slowly and painfully man is learning that he must do unto others what he would have them do to him.

We cannot agree that an act of plunder which threatens the livelihood of many nations should be allowed to succeed.

Nothing is more destructive of human dignity than a rule which imposes a mute and blind obedience.

There is now doubt in our minds that Nasser, whether he likes it or not, is now effectively in Russian hands, just as Mussolini was in Hitler's. It would be as ineffective to show weakness to Nasser now in order to placate him as it was to show weakness to Mussolini.

I am one of a rare breed of true politicians who definitely say what they may or may not mean with absolute certainty.

If you've broken the eggs, you should make the omelette.

That is a good question for you to ask, not a wise question for me to answer.