Top 70 John Major Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is full of surprises.”

— John Major

2. “When your back is against the wall, there is only one thing to do, and that is turn around and fight.”

— John Major

3. “Recovery begins from the darkest moment.”

— John Major

4. “It is time to return to core values, time to get back to basics, to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for the others, to accepting responsibility for yourself and your family – and not shuffling it off on other people and the state.”

— John Major

5. “I’m very proud of what my parents achieved and what they stood for. They didn’t have much, but in many ways they were richer than most.”

— John Major

7. “I want to see us build a country that is at ease with itself, a country that is confident and a country that is able and willing to build a better quality of life for all its citizens.”

— John Major

8. “Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less.”

— John Major

9. “If is a very big preposition.”

— John Major

10. “Neil Kinnock’s speeches go on for so long because he has nothing to say and so he has no way of knowing when he’s finished saying it.”

— John Major

11. “The British don’t runaway from terrorism. We have had 30-odd years of terrorism in our own country from the Irish Republican Army. We’re used to it.”

— John Major

12. “I have a huge admiration for the House of Lords, I have a huge admiration for the people who work in the House of Lords, they’re great public servants and they do an absolutely tremendous job.”

— John Major

13. “A country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist.”

— John Major

14. “The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare.”

— John Major

15. “Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be too clever by half. The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.”

— John Major

16. “I don’t think nations can stand aside for ethnic cleansing and genocide.”

— John Major

17. “Let’s turn British inventions into British industries, British factories and British jobs. Let them make pounds for us, not dollars marks or yen for others.”

— John Major

18. “There are more myths about Black Wednesday than the Greeks ever created.”

— John Major

19. “My mother was the center of the family.”

— John Major

20. “Whether you agree with me or disagree with me; like me or loathe me, don’t bind my hands when I am negotiating on behalf of the British nation.”

— John Major

21. “If the answer is more politicians, you are asking the wrong question.”

— John Major

22. “I am walking over hot coals suspended over a deep pit at the bottom of which are a large number of vipers baring their fangs.”

— John Major

23. “I think the biggest mistake I made was this wretched ability to see both sides of an argument.”

— John Major

24. “Whatever efforts for peace President Gorbachev had in mind, they were pretty substantially undercut very swiftly by Saddam Hussein.”

— John Major

25. “Disunity costs votes.”

— John Major

26. “I am not running as Son of Margaret Thatcher. I have my own priorities and my own programmes.”

— John Major

27. “Of course there are regrets. I shall regret always that I found my own authentic voice in politics. I was too conservative, too conventional. Too safe, too often. Too defensive. Too reactive. Later, too often on the back foot.”

— John Major

28. “If we want to deliver opportunity for all, we need an economy that delivers jobs for the future.”

— John Major

29. “The politician who never made a mistake never made a decision.”

— John Major

30. “In housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces – destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.”

— John Major

31. “They seem to have moved from total opposition to total subservience.”

— John Major

32. “I don’t think it’s the role of the prime minister to court the press.”

— John Major

33. “You’re lucky to head a coalition government. I am a coalition government on my own.”

— John Major

34. “I inherited a sick economy and passed on a sound one. But one abiding regret for me is that, in between, I did not have the resources to put in place the educational and social changes about which I cared to much; I made only a beginning, and it was not enough.”

— John Major

35. “I can’t legislate to change human nature.”

— John Major

36. “I mean if you have ever found a politician who says, ‘No, no, I would do everything exactly as I did,’ then you can tell when he is lying because his lips are moving.”

— John Major

37. “In the next ten years we will have to continue to make changes which will make the whole of this country a genuinely classless society.”

— John Major

38. “Well what would happen is that if Greece defaulted and couldn’t pay its debts, all the Greek bonds that are held in other banking systems across Western Europe would suddenly have no value. You could as a knock-on effect create a banking crisis in Western Europe.”

— John Major

39. “You’ve had an extremely weak euro on the foreign exchange markets, you’ve had a very dubious policy being followed.”

— John Major

40. “Some people eat eggs, I wear them.”

— John Major

41. “I think it’s extremely unlikely that the European Union will fracture with nations dropping off the edge.”

— John Major

42. “What happens when there is a conflict between the Scottish parliament, if it was established, and the Westminster parliament? Who is supreme?”

— John Major

43. “If you look back historically, admittedly a long time ago, there were three Afghan wars in which Britain didn’t even come a good second. In more recent years the Russians were there with 120,000 men for ten years.”

— John Major

44. “I thought I could do something different from any Conservative prime minister before me. But I couldn’t.”

— John Major

45. “My father was 64 when I was conceived, my mother 38, which was late for babies in the 1940s.”

— John Major

46. “Liberty is equally desirable to the good and to the bad, to the brave and to the dastardly.”

— John Major

47. “I like the best of the British press. The best of the British press is very good.”

— John Major

48. “When I was in office the fundraising was done by the party treasurers.”

— John Major

49. “Tentacles of terrorism spread everywhere.”

— John Major

50. “When the euro was born, it was born in the wrong economic circumstances.”

— John Major