Top 60 Gordon Brown Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When the strong help the weak, it makes us all stronger.”

— Gordon Brown

2. “Our new economic approach is rooted in ideas which stress the importance of macro-economics, post neo-classical endogenous growth theory and the symbiotic relationships between growth and investment, and people and infrastructure.”

— Gordon Brown

3. “The vision of personalised public services – meeting the individual needs of all our citizens – requires continuing reform in the way services are delivered.”

— Gordon Brown

4. “Our approach is to reject the old vicious circle of the ’80s-rising debt, higher long-term interest rates, higher debt repayment costs, lower growth, higher unemployment, then enforced cuts in public spending. That was the old boom and bust.”

— Gordon Brown

5. “Rigorous financial discipline that, together with monetary stability, ends once and for all the boom and bust that for 30 years has undermined stability.”

— Gordon Brown

6. “We had lost the art of communication – but not, alas, the gift of speech.”

— Gordon Brown

7. “My favourite sport at school was rugby. All sports are teamwork, but rugby particularly is about teamwork and I think teamwork is the essence of this.”

— Gordon Brown

8. “Take, therefore, what modern technology is capable of: the power of our moral sense allied to the power of communications and our ability to organize internationally. That, in my view, gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world.”

— Gordon Brown

9. “There is a golden thread which runs through British history of the individual, standing firm against tyranny and then of the individual participating in his society.”

— Gordon Brown

10. “We can find common qualities and common values that have made Britain the country it is. Our belief in tolerance and liberty which shines through British history. Our commitment to fairness, fair play and civic duty.”

— Gordon Brown

11. “I’m a father; that’s what matters most. Nothing matters more.”

— Gordon Brown

12. “Under this Government, Britain will not return to the boom and bust of the past.”

— Gordon Brown

13. “Once government’s objectives were economic growth and social cohesion. Now they are prosperity, fairness and environmental care.”

— Gordon Brown

14. “Indeed, Britain was set to repeat the old, familiar cycle of boom and bust. Since then, we have created and rigorously adhered to a new framework of modern economic management.”

— Gordon Brown

15. “I will listen and I will learn. I will strive to meet people’s aspirations. I want to lead a government humble enough to know its place – where I will always strive to be – and that is on people’s side.”

— Gordon Brown

16. “I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith, and people of no faith. But I think what’s new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world.”

— Gordon Brown

17. “I take full responsibility for what happened. That’s why the person who was responsible went immediately.”

— Gordon Brown

18. “If our economies are to flourish, if global poverty is to be banished, and if the well-being of the world’s people enhanced – not just in this generation but in succeeding generations – we must make sure we take care of the natural environment and resources on which our economic activity depends.”

— Gordon Brown

19. “To be a teacher you must be a prophet – because you are trying to prepare people for a world thirty to fifty years into the future.”

— Gordon Brown

20. “Tony Blair is the best friend I’ve had in politics.”

— Gordon Brown

21. “My first rule – the golden rule – ensures that over the economic cycle the Government will borrow only to invest, and that current spending will be met from taxation.”

— Gordon Brown

22. “I said that this would be a Budget based on prudence for a purpose and that guides us also in our approach to public spending.”

— Gordon Brown

23. “Good strong banks are essential for every family and for every business in the country and extraordinary times call for the bold and far-reaching solutions that the Treasury has announced today.”

— Gordon Brown

24. “We are being tough in saying it is a duty on the unemployed in future not only to be available for work – and not to shirk work – but also to get the skills for work. That is a new duty we are introducing.”

— Gordon Brown

25. “We must then build a proper relationship between the richest and the poorest countries based on our desire that they are able to fend for themselves with the investment that is necessary in their agriculture, so that Africa is not a net importer of food, but an exporter of food.”

— Gordon Brown

26. “I’m a great supporter of the European Union. I didn’t support entry to the Euro, not because I’m against it in principle but because I didn’t think it was economically right for Britain. But that doesn’t make me any less pro-European.”

— Gordon Brown

27. “The place of cycling in our society is set to grow, and I am committed to doing everything possible to encourage that.”

— Gordon Brown

28. “On this day I remember words that have stayed with me since my childhood and which matter a great deal to me today, my school motto: “I will try my outmost”. This is my promise to all of the people of Britain and now let the work of change begin.”

— Gordon Brown

29. “There is nothing that you could say to me now that I could ever believe.”

— Gordon Brown

30. “Jubilee 2000 is a broad coalition which has moved the earth.”

— Gordon Brown

31. “No one should be held back from realising their potential by fears that they will not be able to afford to go to university or that they will graduate with unmanageable levels of debt.”

— Gordon Brown

32. “It is time to train British workers for the British jobs that will be available over the coming few years and to make sure that people who are inactive and unemployed are able to get the new jobs on offer in our country.”

— Gordon Brown

33. “Pop Idol, X Factor, Fame Academy, there’s so much talent out there. It’s great to see people getting the chance to show their potential.”

— Gordon Brown

34. “Politics seems much less important today. When you see your young daughter smiling as she was, and moving around, it’s a superb feeling.”

— Gordon Brown

35. “I don’t see politics as one or two people just making or delivering announcements – it’s also about winning public support and the public enthusiasm. You’ve got to win public support.”

— Gordon Brown

36. “You need in the long run for stability, for economic growth, for jobs, as well as for financial stability, global economic institutions that make sure that growth to be sustained has to be shared, and are built on the principle that the prosperity of this world is indivisible.”

— Gordon Brown

37. “I admired and valued Robin as a colleague and friend and as one of the greatest parliamentarians of our time. His wife Gaynor and his two sons are in our thoughts and prayers.”

— Gordon Brown

38. “I think that’s a bit unfair. I’m a father with a 2-year-old child and I feel pretty young, actually.”

— Gordon Brown

39. “So another challenge for our generation is to create global institutions that reflect our ideas of fairness and responsibility, not the ideas that were the basis of the last stage of financial development over these recent years.”

— Gordon Brown

40. “Each year India and China produce four million graduates compared with just over 250,000 in Britain.”

— Gordon Brown

41. “I think people have got to understand when a murder is committed on British soil, when innocent people have been put at risk by the method that murder is committed then we expect authorities in other parts of the world to co-operate.”

— Gordon Brown

42. “America knows it has got to deal with its deficit problems so that it, too, can promise it is making its proper and best contributions to the world economy.”

— Gordon Brown

43. “We’ve got to be explicit that the road to greater economic success does not lie in this cosy assumption that you can move from a single market through a single currency to harmonising all your taxes and then having a federal fiscal policy and then effectively having a federal State.”

— Gordon Brown

44. “I am not going to make decisions based on barricades and blockades, nor am I going to make decisions based on the short-term volatility of the oil price.”

— Gordon Brown

45. “I am happy for there to be a leadership contest. I think there should be.”

— Gordon Brown

46. “Britain can be proud of its response to the tsunami appeal.”

— Gordon Brown

47. “We are entering an era in which national government, instead of directing, enables powerful regional and local initiatives to work, where Britain becomes as it should be – a Britain of nations and regions.”

— Gordon Brown

48. “This is a Budget for Britain’s future to secure fairness for each child and invest in every child.”

— Gordon Brown

49. “Our mission is, in truth, historic and world changing – to build, over the next fifty years and beyond, a global low carbon economy. And it is not overdramatic to say that the character and course of the coming century will be set by how we measure up to this challenge.”

— Gordon Brown

50. “I have been fascinated by men and women of courage. People who took brave decisions in the service of great causes especially when more comfortable and far less dangerous alternatives were open to them.”

— Gordon Brown