We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts.
Harold MacmillanRead
(A Foreign Secretary) is forever poised between the cliche and the indiscretion.
Interpretation
The role of a Foreign Secretary involves balancing between safe, clichéd statements and risky, potentially indiscreet ones.
Harold Macmillan's quote highlights the delicate position of a Foreign Secretary, emphasizing the challenge of navigating between the predictability of clichéd responses and the danger of making indiscreet remarks. This reflects the intricate balance required in diplomacy, where the choice of words can significantly impact international relations and negotiations.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the challenges of political communication.
We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts.
History is apt to judge harshly those who sacrifice tomorrow for today.
Power? It's like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.
The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.
I will step outside the system. Voting for the “lesser evil”-or failing to vote at all-is part of the corporate agenda to crush what is left of our anemic democracy. And those who continue to participate in the vaudeville of a two-party process, who refuse to confront in every way possible the structures of corporate power, assure our mutual destruction.
The ultimate victory of tomorrow is democracy, and through democracy with education, for no people in all the world can be kept eternally ignorant or eternally enslaved.
Politics in America is the binding secular religion.
A Christian cannot fail of being a republican.
We do not want to see a Hong Kong that enjoys freedoms on paper but whose autonomous status conceals the workings of a totalitarian state.
It's the Labour Government that have brought us record peacetime taxation. They've got the usual Socialist disease - they've run out of other people's money.
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