The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

We must not look for some kind of Messiah.

Newspapers are tutors as well as informers.

You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.

People can say what they want in the Labour Party.

She has no imagination and that means no compassion.

I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old.

All is fair in love and war and Parliamentary procedure.

Most liberties have been won by people who broke the law.

You can have a wages policy imposed by mass unemployment.

A Royal Commission is a broody hen sitting on a china egg.

The only man I knew who could make a curse sound like a caress.

I'd like to be remembered as somebody who tried to promote justice.

Socialism without public ownership is nothing but a fantastic apology.

I have never been in favour of expelling people from the Labour Party.

There are judges who stretch the law... to suit reactionary attitudes.

The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.

I would die for my country but I could never let my country die for me.

Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.

How long will it be before the cry goes up: "Let's kill all the judges"?

I would die for my country, but I could never let my country die for me.

The unforgivable political sin is vanity, the killer diet is sour grapes.

The unforgivable political sin is vanity; the killer diet is sour grapes.

Of course my father was a great influence on me. He taught me how to read.

Think of it! A second chamber selected by the Whips. A seraglio of eunuchs.

New!Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.

Two negatives don't make a positive, any more than two half-wits make a wit.

Resentment is an extremely bitter diet, I have no desire to make my own toxins.

Politicians live in little worlds of their own and imagine these are the universe.

Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power.

Mobile phones are the only subject on which men boast about who's got the smallest.

We cannot remove the evils of capitalism without taking its source of power: ownership.

Arthur Scargill is the Labour movements nearest equivalent to a First World War General.

Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry.

In the U.K. the far Right is a stain on society and there is a cultural resistance to it.

He's passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever.

They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow.

Without false modetsy, I don't think I have a fraction of the talent of either Bevan of Foot.

The trouble with the Socialist Workers Party is that they live in an historical thermos-flask.

I'm the guy everybody wanted to live next door. They just didn't want me to be prime minister.

Harold Wilson is a petty bourgeois and will remain so in spirit even if they make him a Viscount.

There is nothing wrong with being a Marxist. Their point of view is essential to a democratic debate.

I didn't call for a ballot at the start of the miners' strike in 1984. I'll regret that until my dying day.

I certainly think that a Labour Government will have to have effective powers to control the outflow of capital.

People must learn more and more that the strength of this country is the democratic power of the trade union movement.

I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.

[Marx's theories] gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.

I want to retire at 50. I want to play cricket in the summer and geriatric football in the winter, and sing in the choir.

No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.

Political renegades always start their career of treachery as 'the best men of all parties' and end up in the Tory knackery.

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