David Miliband Quotes

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

We know there can be no justice in the Middle East without a Palestinian state. But there can be no security in the Middle East without a Palestinian state.

Good politics starts with empathy, proceeds to analysis, then sets out values and establishes the vision, before getting to the nitty-gritty of policy solutions.

I was always brought up that if you can make a difference, you should, and if you don’t it’s a waste. So we’ll see if I can make a difference.

The big risk to British lives in 2013 is in Afghanistan. Our troops, diplomats and aid workers have made a big contribution there. But while there is an end date for Western engagement, 2014, there isn’t a proper end game.

You know, you only get to live life once, so there are two things that that yields. One is that there’s no point in crying over spilt milk, but secondly you hate wasting time, energy, and whatever talent you’ve got.

The biggest opportunity in 2013 is in Africa. It has seven out of the ten fastest-growing economies in the world. In Nigeria alone there are 100 million people with mobile phones. In total, 300 million Africans – five times the population of Britain – are in the middle class.

The 1970s – I was ten in 1975 – were a bad decade in all sorts of ways but the middle class had comfortable assumptions about the prospects for its children. The middle class was smaller then; it was a much less competitive Britain, less meritocratic.

My advice is very simple: if you can win a small battle, it gives you confidence in the political process to take on bigger battles, and so it is very much a bottom-up grass-roots way of doing politics.

If you want to fight against a declining trend, you’ve got to have a much bigger bazooka.

Communism was meant to be an alternative religion.

I think the wonderment of seeing my two sons developing makes me incredibly optimistic about human potential. It makes you think: ‘My goodness. It’s a miracle that’s going on here. What could the human race do together?’

The American idea that everyone graduates high school at 18 is a good one.

My favourite poem is called ‘Roots and Wings’ – it’s a very moving poem about how if you’ve got real roots you can fly.

There is a danger for Britain as we perceive ourselves, or as we are – less wealthy, facing economic austerity – that we essentially draw back. I think there is a recoil in parts of the country, and in parts of the government actually, from the multilateral system, and I think that’s dangerous and wrong.

One of the things about the modern world is that the public and the private – which is not the same as the public and the personal – but the public and the private… it’s very, very much harder than it used to be to have things that are private and things that are public.

I am the ‘change Britain’ candidate. We can only change Britain through a united Labour Party and I am the unity candidate. I have got support from the Left and the Right of the party.

Today, Labour has a disruptive economic narrative – that Britain needs fundamental change in its market structure and culture to compete in the modern world.

The biggest novelty of 2013 will be new leadership in China. Very little is known about the views of the new leaders – who will rule the country for ten years. But we do know they’re the first generation of Chinese leaders who have spent the majority of their lives in a China ‘opening up’ to the rest of the world.

And the truth is, those who are terrorists only have to succeed once, and those of us who are trying to build an inclusive society have to succeed every time.

John Major put the ‘er’ back into Conservative, David Cameron’s put the ‘Con’ into Conservative – and Norman Lamont put the ‘vat’ into Conservative!

The wedding ring on my left hand was bought by my grandfather, Samuel Miliband, in Brussels in 1920. I never knew him, as he died when I was one. But his ring was kept by my aunt until it was placed on my finger by my wife Louise 32 years later.

I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for ‘history.’ The closest word for it is memory.

Successful economies in the modern world are not sheepish about the power and responsibility of the state.

My memories are of my dad taking me to football on Saturday mornings, and my mum taking me swimming. Those are the things I remember from my childhood, not sitting around the table debating capitalism and the profit squeeze.

The problems that the world faces – from nuclear proliferation to climate change – can’t be tackled by the West alone. They need a coalition of not just West and East, but they need a coalition of Christian and Jew and Muslim.

The test of leadership for David Cameron was actually to bring the British Conservative Party back in to the mainstream.

We keep the terrorist threat to the United Kingdom under very careful scrutiny. We think it’s right to keep the public informed about the general threat level.

In Britain, the centrally prescribed welfare to work system short-changes the young unemployed. Transport, housing and education are over centralised.

I can’t admit to myself that the creation of a Palestinian state won’t happen. What I know is that with each passing year it gets more and more difficult to happen, not least because there is more and more bloodshed, generation upon generation.

Al Qaeda has no place in Pakistan. It’s a threat to Pakistan. And there should be a convergence of interests between the Pakistani state and the West on security issues, but also on wider economic and social issues.

In the end, human history is made up of all our decisions.

But for me, my personal relations, my personal family relations, are very important, and we’ve always tried to make sure that the public and the private are kept separate.