“No, because I do my sums with matchsticks.”
Explore Parliament website, accessed 6 September 2006 http://www.explore-parliament.net/nssMovies/03/0378/0378_.htm
Asked whether he could become Prime Minister in an interview with The Observer in 1962. The comment was taken to refer to his lack of economic ability.
Foreign Secretary
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Alec Douglas-Home 14
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1903–1995Related quotes

1940s, 1940, Laureate Cross acceptance speech (July 1940)

“My approach to the job can be summed up pretty simply — I never viewed politics as my career.”
Governor's Travels : How I Left Politics, Learned to Back Up a Bus, and Found America (2011)
Context: My approach to the job can be summed up pretty simply — I never viewed politics as my career. Important, yes, worthy of intense commitment, of course — but it was not my whole life. … I saw politics as a way to make a contribution and satisfy my penchant for public policy, but not as something I couldn't live without.
“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring.”
Interview (30 October 1982) in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
Context: I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again … the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.

Source: Speech to the Police Federation conference in Eastbourne (18 May 1976) regarding the Federation's campaign on law and order, quoted in The Times (19 May 1976), p. 5

“Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.”
Address to the Harvard Alumni Association to the Class of '61, in Speeches (1913), p. 96.
1910s

Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 267)
Other translation:
Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
Richard Friedenthal (1968, p. 256); Also quoted in: John Bowker (1988), Is anybody out there?: religions and belief in God in the contemporary world. p. 57.
1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35