David Miliband

You know, you only get to live life once, so there are two things that that yields. One is that there's no point in crying over spilt milk, but secondly you hate wasting time, energy, and whatever talent you've got.

Good politics starts with empathy, proceeds to analysis, then sets out values and establishes the vision, before getting to the nitty-gritty of policy solutions.

The whole of government needs to contribute to the shared goal of restructuring the British economy. But that means taking on the myth that the Treasury either knows best or can run it all. It just doesn't.

I can't admit to myself that the creation of a Palestinian state won't happen. What I know is that with each passing year it gets more and more difficult to happen, not least because there is more and more bloodshed, generation upon generation.

The big risk to British lives in 2013 is in Afghanistan. Our troops, diplomats and aid workers have made a big contribution there. But while there is an end date for Western engagement, 2014, there isn't a proper end game.

Al Qaeda has no place in Pakistan. It's a threat to Pakistan. And there should be a convergence of interests between the Pakistani state and the West on security issues, but also on wider economic and social issues.

You have to believe that it's through politics that societies can lead social and economic and political change.

People want more power over their own lives. That's not just true in Britain, it's true around the world.

I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for 'history.' The closest word for it is memory.

My memories are of my dad taking me to football on Saturday mornings, and my mum taking me swimming. Those are the things I remember from my childhood, not sitting around the table debating capitalism and the profit squeeze.

The 1970s - I was ten in 1975 - were a bad decade in all sorts of ways but the middle class had comfortable assumptions about the prospects for its children. The middle class was smaller then; it was a much less competitive Britain, less meritocratic.

My advice is very simple: if you can win a small battle, it gives you confidence in the political process to take on bigger battles, and so it is very much a bottom-up grass-roots way of doing politics.