David Gauke Quotes

I had amazing stuff happen right off the top. I thought this was how it worked. Hollywood is awesome! Cut to three years later: What happened?

Politics is tricky; it cuts both ways. Every time you make a choice, it has unintended consequences.

While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done.

Many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!

Having overthrown this one devil, we might be facing seven new devils .

For his failures, Rumsfeld must go!

Before it happened to me, I'd look at other people who had become really successful and think, 'What a dream. That must be absolutely everything they ever wanted.' When it does happen to you, you realize yes, it's incredible. But it also comes with a bit of a weird aftertaste.

I was so successful in Cleveland, and we moved to Los Angeles, and there was nothing for me to do. All of a sudden, from being a success, I was a has-been at 13.

You're not always going to have a perfect day. You're not always going to have the day that you envision.

At Duke, the coaches would cover up for you. But with the Wolves, something happens and it's in the papers, and I'm blamed. Things are run differently here - the wrong way, if you ask me. One man wants to blame another.

I felt guilty - like, I leaked this memo, and now there's going to be a witch hunt for the person who did it, and I'm not going to be able to deny it. That was when reality hit.

All political careers end in failure, but few did it so quickly as David Cameron's. He came to power promising not to 'bang on about Europe' and ended up having the continent's name chiselled into the lid of his political coffin.

Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that's rarely the case.

Great power is setting a goal, working hard for it, and achieving it in exactly the way you expected with no consequences and no remainders after the long division is done. But does that happen to anyone? The unexpected always hitches a ride along with everything you planned.

Politics, as a profession, is not about making the right political decision. It's about making the right decision and then managing the political consequences.

I was always the person who would make the mistake. I was the one who would get suspended from school.

Whether it is throwing people under the bus or writing a lie on the side of one: Britain deserves better than Boris Johnson.

The hole I've dug for myself is very big.

Someone like Boris Johnson is reluctant to answer questions about ambition because then the story becomes all about his ambition. Sure, he's got ambition - that's no secret at all. But also, he's very strongly motivated to try to get the kind of Brexit he believes in.

Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

Answered prayers are scary. They imply responsibility. You asked for it. Now that you've got it, what are you going to do? Why else the cautionary phrase Watch out for what you pray for; you might just get it?

That's the problem in politics. One wrong word and it's over.