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Response to a journalist when asked what is most likely to blow governments off course.

— Harold Macmillan Disputed

Events, dear boy, events.

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Government

More quotes by Harold Macmillan

We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down before the divine right of experts.

Forever poised between a cliché and an indiscretion.

Nonsense, there are no clubs around Victoria.

First of all the Georgian Silver goes, and then all that nice furniture that used to be in the salon. Then the Canalettos go.

America is “the new Roman empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.”

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Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small.

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene (1589)

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

James Madison

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

John Adams

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Harold Macmillan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.