Top 108 Quotes by David Blunkett

Much extremist activity falls short of directly inciting people to violence or other crimes and so is not caught by laws on incitement. Neither does the Public Order Act, used to protect groups of people from harassment, deal with the problem.

If you don't create a sense of order and stability, if people do not feel secure, then progressive politics is dead. That is a fact of history. The right has always emerged supreme when destabilisation and insecurity prevail.

To punish MPs because of the distance they live from London - those with fast train journeys quite close to London as well as those at some distance from both the capital or an appropriate airport - is perverse, but also dangerous to democracy.

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, in hosting the G20 summit and in the budget, must display the same boldness in tackling the instability at home that they do in promoting a worldwide answer to the global meltdown.

If you have a sense of irony or humour, you're usually cut down, as you're usually distorted or misinterpreted. So it does lead to us being slightly more dour and staid and predictable than would otherwise be the case, which I personally find quite frustrating - because if you don't laugh occasionally in my job, you cry most of the time.

And we think that our citizens and yours would be very angry if they thought that we hadn't taken every possible step for prevention and then for joint action in the likelihood of those who threaten our lives and our well- being, taking action at the same time.

Balancing the common good with the freedom and liberty to exercise that individuality has been and remains a challenge for those committed to democracy while understanding that the polis ensures our participation and therefore our citizenship.