Francis Maude Quotes

During the Blair-Brown decade social concerns - what kind of society we have become - have gradually replaced economic worries. People fear that we have become an increasingly fragmented, boorish, more violent society.

We should be the natural home for younger voters. But today we're not. Because too often we sound like people who just don't like contemporary Britain.

The left has lost the common touch.

There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.

Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.

I want to fight poverty and ignorance and give opportunity to those people who are locked out.

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste... would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over all the world.

One should be very careful indeed about using such loaded terms as ‘frustration,’ ‘anger,’ and especially ‘resentment’ to explain populism. One should at least face up to the political consequences of such psychologizing diagnoses — namely, that they end up confirming those people’s view of ‘liberal elites’ as being not just deeply condescending but also constitutively unable to live up to their own democratic ideals by failing to take ordinary people at their word.

The increasing segregation we have in our country geographically and culturally has led to these pretty monolithic views of different classes of people, and because of that, we've lost a certain amount of cultural cohesion.

Latin America is not that different from the rest of the world. Some of us have been trying to get from the edges into the centre, but we're very few. The world is still very resistant to understanding the diversity of human beings.

We cannot effect meaningful change if we become complacent, if we become comfortable with our own positions in the status quo.

A lot of times, older people don't get the new generation.

I'm telling you, the disconnect is big, and the gap of understanding between the people in Washington, in news media, the New York/Boston/Washington corridor and the rest of the country, that gap is widening.

Until people realise benefits doesn't mean scrounger, and austerity isn't a fun middle-class way to grow your own vegetables, there's still a lot of work to do.

If you don't speak English, then there is no way you can take full advantage of the opportunities that modern Britain has to offer you.

As we progress as a species, we will unlock new means for enhancing our lives at every turn - and our conceptions of wealth and poverty will evolve in tandem.

It's hard for me to understand how poverty can be invisible to so many people, since I see it everywhere. Readers sometimes think this world is so different; on the one hand, they feel connected to the people I'm writing about, and on the other hand, they're saying their lives are a world away.

I am from a very vague caste. I don't belong to any of the four. I am kayastha. They are well read, largely clerks so they get treated respectfully.

In the decades since my youth, I've witnessed the explosion of fatherless families and an exponential increase in illiteracy and crime.

Britain has moved on. It is a radically different country from that which shaped New Labour.

There is no room any more for the divisive agenda which has been sought to be foisted on the common man.

London can be a platform to look at what living in contemporary Britain is all about.

Not everybody gets to travel halfway around the world to see a whole different perspective. If we can see that on TV, we'll know that society is bigger than the small world we all live in.

I'm 28 years old. In my country, that's considered very young. It's almost like the youth don't matter to the up-and-ups.