Aneurin Bevan
Politics is a blood sport.Collection: Politics
Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.Collection: Society
I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.Collection: Politics
This is my truth, tell me yours.Collection: Truth
The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.Collection: Power
I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one.Collection: Sympathy
It is not possible to create peace in the Middle East by jeopardizing the peace of the world.Collection: Peace
This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.
No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do.
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.
It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically.
I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.
No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Stand not too near the rich man lest he destroy thee - and not too far away lest he forget thee.
Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.
He seems determined to make a trumpet sound like a tin whistle.
Poor fellow, he suffers from files.
Reactionary: a man walking backwards with his face to the future.
Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.
I know that the right kind of political leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine.
No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.Collection: Mean
The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for itCollection: Fighting
How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.Collection: Art
Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television setsCollection: People
Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the 'greatest good for the greatest number' can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual.Collection: Impact
What should be the glory of the profession is that a doctor should be able to meet his patients with no financial anxiety.Collection: Doctors
We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land.Collection: Land
If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution.Collection: Poverty
The Tories always hold the view that the state is an apparatus for the protection of the swag of the property owners ... Christ drove the money changers out of the temple, but you inscribe their title deed on the altar cloth.Collection: Views
Damn it all you can't have the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver.Collection: Political
I know that the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation. If he sees suffering, privation or injustice he must not allow it to move him, for that would be evidence of the lack of proper education or of absence of self-control. He must speak in calm and objective accents and talk about a dying child in the same way as he would about the pieces inside an internal combustion engine.Collection: Children
There is only one hope for mankind - and that is democratic Socialism.Collection: Democratic Socialism
Discontent arises from a knowledge of the possible, as contrasted with the actual.Collection: Arise
There are two ways of getting into the Cabinet - you can crawl in or kick your way in.Collection: Two
I welcome this opportunity of pricking the bloated bladder of lies with the poniard of truthCollection: Lying
He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind. He does not have to struggle... with the crowded pulsations of a fecund imagination. On the contrary he is almost devoid of imagination.Collection: Struggle
We should not be pushing out figured when the facts are in the opposite direction.Collection: Opposites
I am not going to spend any time whatsoever in attacking the Foreign Secretary. If we complain about the tune, there is no reason to attack the monkey when the organ grinder is present.Collection: Tunes
[Winston Churchill] never spares himself in conversation. He gives himself so generously that hardly anyone else is permitted to give anything in his presence.Collection: Giving
He [Winston Churchill] is a man suffering from petrified adolescence.Collection: Men
Virtue is its own punishment.Collection: Life
Listening to a speech by [Neville] Chamberlain is like paying a visit to Woolworth's, everything in its place and nothing above sixpence.Collection: Political
You don't have to gaze into a crystal ball when you can read an open book.Collection: Life
Trade unions are islands of anarchy in a sea of chaos.Collection: Fear
The language of priorities is the religion of socialism.Collection: Priorities
Advertising is 'an evil service'.Collection: Evil
The hero's need of the people outlasts their need of him.Collection: Hero
In Germany democracy died by the headman's axe. In Britain it can be by pernicious anaemia.Collection: Insulting