Finance Ministers

"We ask you (China) to relocate your industry to Pakistan as our Special Economic Zones are now ready. If you bring your industry here, it will be a win-win situation for both countries."

"We need sanctions that bite (Russia)."

"Our European skies are open skies. They're open for those who connect people, not for those who seek to brutally aggress."

"Relations with Russia are currently extremely unstable and uncertain. If things go awry for our neighbors, then that is also a problem for us. It also has a direct impact on our country and on Europe as a whole, in the form of for example refugee numbers and energy prices. There is a need to ease tensions and restore stability. An open conflict is in nobody's interest."

"Freedom of expression is one of the foundations of our society. Everyone is free to express their opinion. But our society will never accept indiscriminate violence, and even less towards our police forces."

"The provision of the wheelchairs would therefore address some challenges (for the disabled) such as integration into society as well as access to health and basic services and fill other gaps. We cannot talk about inclusivity if we do not empower people, at the grassroots level."

"Training young women in government across Africa is so important because they need to continuously increase their knowledge and skills in order to ensure an effective and more responsive public service."

"Serbia now has a chance that will not repeat for a long time, to make use of the major changes brought about by digitalisation and to completely reverse its economic destiny within a short time. The new potentials before us do not depend on anyone and anything else, but only on ourselves and our readiness to win in the big international competition. We are entering a dynamic process of digitalisation, modernisation, integrative education and work, the period of rapid growth, new opportunities, a significantly higher standard ofliving and an overall better life of all the citizens of Serbia."

"We are living in exciting times of the fourth industrial revolution, which is giving opportunities to countries like Serbia, who were not winners of the third industrial revolution but can become winners of the fourth. In the fourth industrial revolution we are all given a chance to restart from scratch and rebuild our nation. I thought this was a fantastic opportunity for Serbia. Digitalisation along with education reform to prepare our youth for the jobs of the future were the cornerstones of my government."

"It is important that we agree about the priorities and reach a social understanding on what we can and must jointly achieve in order to take Serbia among theranks of successful states. The time before us will show how courageous as society and individuals we are to jointly push boundaries and step into the future for the sake of all of us. And I believe in the citizens of Serbia."

"Digitalisation opens up new possibilities for a better quality of life of the citizens through a greater number of services, for services that are cheaper, for providing more accessible information and knowledge, for people to inter-connect. Although it is often connected with technology, digitalisation is much more than that, because it provides opportunities for new and better-paid jobs. Digitalisation may increase our export and, even more importantly, it is our chance to stop the brain drain and even reverse the trend."

"Serbia is thinking about its economic interests, its role in political frameworks, it is thinking about the best interest of its citizens. Our strategic path is the EU, but we have traditional ties with the Russian people and economic ties, because Russia is a big market."

"It is important to launch core reforms in education and healthcare and boost production primarily through developing agriculture and IT sector. We see the latter as a potentially key sector for future development because there is a real need today for several thousand programmers."

"The role of the state should be to stimulate and allow an open, dynamic economy, to develop infrastructure, to provide as best quality and cost-effective services as possible, to eliminate administrative barriers, to encourage, support, and legally protect every entrepreneurial initiative, with accountable and well-structured social policy in line with economic possibilities."

"The reason why I am not focused on that now is because I deeply, truly believe Serbia will be a more tolerant society once people have jobs, better paid jobs, don’t have to care about their own livelihood, or the future of their own children, and do not have to worry about two or three generations living in the same flat."

"The citizens of Serbia have a right not to be portrayed by a loud minority. We can have a culture where we disagree, as long as there is tolerance and no violence. We all have different views and values, but I don’t want to change people’s thinking by law."

"If we do not have rule of law and effective and transparent judiciary, everything else will start crumbling down."

"Serbia is changing and changing fast, and if you will, I am part of that change, but I do not want to be branded ‘Serbia’s gay PM’. The message we need to send is about competence, professionalism and trustworthiness."

"My mission is to modernise our society in all its segments. By working on digitalisation, we will create society that provides equal opportunities to all of its citizens. This Government has a good basis that has been laid by the previous one and I am going to lead it in such a way as to retain the focus on the set goals, with digitalisation and education listed as my top priorities."

"When people feel that they are empowered… then they can do whatever they want to do. It’s their country to change."

"I am aware that these are the challenges before which many would back away, but we have to set big goals and to work diligently and with dedication in order to make such a step forward because of all of us and the generations to come. We are responsible towards them,just as our ancestors were responsible towards us. Dedication, decisiveness, openness andcourage are the values on which my work will be based and I invite you all to join me so that we could leave the remnants of the past where they belong – in the past. I am looking into the future because now is the moment when we can do the right things, with no delay, nowaiting and no excuses."

"The government's priority remains the earliest termination of this hijacking and the earliest return of the passengers, crew and aircraft."

"We do not believe that bilateral relations between India and Pakistan ought to or can be held hostage by any single issue."

"We will pick up the threads from the visit of the president of Pakistan. We will increasingly endeavor to revise the vision of the relationship of peace, friendship and cooperation with Pakistan."

"This summit has set the tone for future relations with Pakistan, ... The caravan of peace has continued its march and on some auspicious day it will reach its destination."

"Cavour has all the prudence and all the imprudence of the true statesman."

"We who have seen Italia in the throes, Half risen but to be hurled to ground, and now, Like a ripe field of wheat where once drove plough, All bounteous as she is fair, we think of those Who blew the breath of life into her frame: Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi: Three: Her Brain, her Soul, her Sword; and set her free ruinous discords, with one lustrous aim."

"[The] greatest, Cavour, bold, persistent, far-sighted, subtle, with the true quality of the statesman, as Manzoni said of him, “the prudences and the imprudences,” a prince among all the political calculators whom Mazzini most profoundly distrusted and abhorred."

"Two men at this moment divide the attention of Europe, the Emperor Napoleon and Count Cavour. I back Count Cavour."

"The death of Cavour is an immense event! ... He was a thorough Italian statesman of the middle ages; most fertile in device, & utterly unscrupulous; an almost unrivalled union of subtelty & vigor."

"These [the Masonic and Protestant nations] had the objective - apart from personal enrichment and power - an ideological objective for which they were aided by the liberal Freemasons all over the world, was to transform Rome from caput mundi to caput Italiae, for it is evident that Rome as the capital of Italy had ceased to be Rome. In fact, this is said in a way, at a time more or less contemporaneous with the events, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was a genius, describes this feat of Cavour who had succeeded in transforming a spiritual power like Italy into a colony, and we since then are colonies of whoever has more power moment by moment: it may be England, it may be France, it may be Germany, always colonies we are."

"For this Fatherland of his, he was ready, as are all great statesmen and founders of nations, to sell his soul; on the altar of this Fatherland of his he would not have hesitated for a single moment to burn all his sentiments, all his interests, all his preconceived ideas, even the Statuto, if it had been necessary, even religion, if it had been shown to be incompatible with the State in which the Fatherland was incarnate."

"In truth he was a high-minded political idealist, without a touch of the narrow-minded doctrinaire; he was no evangelist and no pedant; a successful practitioner of expediency, but no empiric. He never professed himself a democrat in any strict sense, and he never sympathised with any of the schools that he always called "the exaggerated." He used words on government by state of siege, and a free church in a free state, which were accepted as orthodox liberal formulae in most of Europe."

"In truth his policy was directed to the greatness of the State, not to the liberty of the people; he sought the greatest amount of power consistent with the maintenance of the monarchical constitution, not the greatest amount of freedom compatible with national independence. To this question of State, this ragion di stato, everything else but the forms of the government was to be sacrificed."

"[Cavour is] one of those domineering, grasping men [who has] a radical contempt for all law but their own will. [He] is a Voltairian in his philosophy and wholly unscrupulous in his words and actions – a fact which should not be regarded as a fault in him, for were it otherwise he would be wholly unfit for and incapable of the government of an Italian people. He loves money and has made a large private fortune while attending to the affairs of his nation, and he dearly loves power. Of this he can never bring himself to partake with any other: nor can he brook the least opposition from any quarter great or small."

"Cavour, the only truly European figure of the Risorgimento. Cavour shows no trace of the congenital narrowness which delayed the intellectual emancipation of the agricultural classes. Sprung though he was from the small landed nobility, he succeeded in ridding himself completely of the intellectual attitude of his class, and attaining a wholly modern conception of the economic functions of Society. His scientific education was in the school of Manchester Liberalism. The studies which he published before 1848 on the Anti-Corn-Law League and the Irish question are as good as anything in the literature of the day; unlike the rhetorical exercises of a Bastiat, they reveal a sense of reality and a preference for facts over doctrinal formulae. To the Manchester School Cavour owed not only a general view of the laws governing exchange, but also something deeper and more intimate, not to be expressed in abstract scientific terms: a consciousness of the expansive power of modern industrial Society, and a confidence in individual initiative and enterprise, destroying old habits in order to launch out on a new path fraught with hopes and dangers."

"Tell that good friend of ours that our trade laws are the most liberal of the continent; that for ten years we have been practising the maxims that he exhorts us to adopt; tell him that he preaches to the converted."

"Italy, both present and future, will regard him as one of the most distinguished patriots who have adorned the history of any country. She will owe to him as great obligations as any nation ever owed to any of its members."

"[We desire] to imbue all sections of society, both civil and religious, with the ideal of liberty. We desire economic liberty, we desire administrative liberty, we desire full and absolute liberty of conscience. We desire all the political liberties that are compatible with the maintenance of public order. And therefore, as a necessary consequence of this order of things, we deem it essential...that the principle of liberty should be applied to the relations between Church and State."

"The genius of modern business is present in Cavour's programme of railway construction, out of all proportion with the modest interests of the little Piedmontese kingdom of the time, but commensurate with the needs of the future. The same outlook, the same vital lack of equilibrium between the present and the future, is revealed by his participation in the Crimean War. And Cavour's internal policy, which won the co-operation of conservatives and revolutionaries, Moderates and democrats, however hostile to each other, in a single national scheme, and fitted admirably in its turn into a complicated international policy, gives the full measure of the powers of this genius. In the work of Cavour we feel for the first time in Italian history the living spirit of the modern Liberal State; the State which feeds upon mighty conflicts, which reconciles violent passions any one of which in isolation would be destructive and disastrous, while each, in its union with the others, is an element of life and progress."

"It is perhaps in the sphere of political institutions that the English have been most original in their native invention, from the time of Magna Charta downwards, or even from the time of William the Conqueror. Certainly it is in politics that the world at large has borrowed most from us; for our literature, though as great as the Greek or Latin, has had relatively little influence outside the English-speaking nations. In politics modern Italy, under Cavour, went to school in England, borrowing thence her constitutional monarchy and parliament."

"He Paolo Sarpi] was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour."

"[John Bright] enjoyed an interview with Cavour, the only ‘statesman’ whom he really admired between the death of Peel and the Presidency of Lincoln. He noted Cavour's “eye expressing mildness and firmness, and a mouth very pleasing but showing strength. He has the appearance of an intelligent English gentleman farmer, rather than of a fine and subtle Italian.”"

"Far from being a reed painted to look like iron, he was an iron rod painted to look like a reed."

"All the enlightened thinkers of the world felt the blow as a common loss to the great community of liberty; the Puritans in England lamented: a prince has fallen in Israel."

"Cavour had trained himself—for no one was his teacher—in what was then the British school of politics. Passionate Italian as he was, his political and economic ideas were based on acute observations made in England, and on a close study of the work of Grey and Peel. Believing in civil and religious freedom to a degree unusual among Continental statesmen of any party, he regarded freely elected Parliaments as the essential organ of government, and force as no remedy, except to expel the stranger and the despot. Any fool, he said, could govern by martial law. According to him, it was the business of a statesman to govern by Parliament, not indeed obeying every behest of ignorant partisans and corrupt interests, but persuading the country and the Chamber to take the right course, by weight of the authority due to wisdom, knowledge and experience. This ideal, seldom realised in any country, was the actual method by which Cavour governed Piedmont in the fifties. If he had lived to govern all Italy in the same manner during the sixties and seventies, the country which he created would have avoided many misfortunes besides those of Custoza, Lissa, and Mentana. And if then the example of Cavour had been preferred to that of Bismarck as the model for the patriots and statesmen of modern Europe, the whole world would now be a better place than it is."

"Long live the republic, down with all tyrants!"

"Acton had an abhorrence of Carlylean hero-worship, and he did less than justice to Cavour's regeneration of Italy. His criticism of a man who for many years of his too brief life was engrossed in a desperate struggle for national independence is cold and dry. He cannot conceal either the scanty resources which Cavour had at his disposal, or the magnitude of the results which those resources were made to achieve. But, true to his favourite subject, he analysed the Minister's conception of liberty, and found it wanting. It was liberty for the State, not liberty for the individual, nor for the Church. Yet Cavour's cherished ideal was “a free Church in a free State,” and he would probably have replied that from the purely individual point of view Piedmont might well challenge comparison with the Austrian provinces of Italy or the States of the Church. If Cavour's life had been spared, we may be sure that he would, as his dying words about Naples imply, have governed in accordance with the principles of constitutional freedom."

"Count Cavour holds far too great a place in the history of our time to permit us to pass over his death in silence. Short as was his public career, he was the most remarkable man of our generation, and his influence will probably be felt longer and more widely than that of any living being."

"“All was well till two days before this loot and arson when a young man came from the Punjab and made highly inflammatory speeches. He also held Conferences with the Muslim League leaders. He asked the people that if nothing else, they could at least set fire to houses of Hindus and loot their property. Soon after this speech by this young man from the Punjab young boys, supported by local Muslim League workers, began to set fire to shops.”"