Anthony Eden Quotes

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

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.

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.

The more the planners, the worse the plans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Corruption never has been compulsory.

All prejudices are equally fatal to good government.

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

Drift is the demon of democracy.

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.

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