Gordon Brown

“I believe that our vote is both a public duty and a sacred trust.”

“When I lost the sight of my eye and faced the prospect of going blind, my sight was saved by the NHS.”

“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.”

“Higher energy prices are requiring industry and commerce to examine the costs and efficiency of energy use.”

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

“To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots.”

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

“Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different.”

“Globalisation feels like a runaway train, out of control.”

“Foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites.”

“Almost certainly, my ancestors had travelled by sea from Sweden to England in search of prosperity, and the evidence suggests they left Sweden around the ninth or 10th centuries.”

“In Britain, we are not a secular state as France is, or some other countries.”

“You can't just vote for yourself. All the time, you're thinking what sort of country, what world, what future?”

“I have to say that if our global alliances are going to be alliances with Hezbollah and Hamas and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and Vladimir Putin's Russia, there is absolutely no chance of building a world-wide alliance that can deal with poverty and inequality and climate change and financial instability, and we've got to face up to that fact.”

“I find it quite unusual for people to criticise me for doing what I consider to be my duty.”

“Our equality bill is specifically designed to protect religion and belief on exactly the same terms as race or gender or sexuality.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I am a father with young kids, and you want to know the jobs in the future are going to be there.”

“When things are difficult, you have to be sure of who you are and what you want to achieve.”