Ken Livingstone
It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the [congestion] charge that everybody else is paying and not actually try and skive out of it like some chiselling little crook.Collection: Nice
I just long for the day when I wake up and find that the Saudi royal family are swinging from lamp-posts.Collection: Family
Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz.Collection: Cutting
The Tories had the legal right to demand extra meetings of the council but I could decide when they would be held and always called them for Friday afternoons, knowing that three or four of the richer Tories went to the country early and were not prepared to stay in the city beyond lunchtime. I realised that nothing in politics is new when I read in Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars that Julius Caesar pulled the same trick when reactionaries in the senate were making his life difficult.Collection: Friday
Just because I am critical of the coalition doesn't mean I am anti-English. I am just anti-scumbags.Collection: Mean
One thing that Chairman Mao did was to end the appalling foot binding of women. That alone justifies the Mao Tse-tung era.Collection: Feet
The American agenda is sweeping everything before it, and although it's not perfect, the EU is better on environmental issues. It's a less rapacious form of capitalism.Collection: Issues
Politics is not a game. Thousands of people's jobs and services depended on what the GLC did, and they expected us to do the best we could.Collection: Jobs
Working with the Jewish community is essential to me and what I stand for. I do explicitly see Jewish people as a people - not either a religion or an ethnicity but a people. The Tories take Jewish London for granted. I will not.Collection: Ethnicity
I take a much more pragmatic view than many people on the Left about working with Neil Kinnock. Kinnock represents the best vehicle possible for achieving socialism now.Collection: Views
Everyone is bisexual. Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything.Collection: Bisexual
Well, on lots of small things we could have done better, but on all the big things we called it right. You should make less mistakes as you get older, and I became a councillor back in 1971, so if by this stage in politics I'm making lots of big mistakes, then I shouldn't be here.Collection: Mistake
I'd love to write about my growing sexual awareness, but the press would turn it into something squalid.Collection: Writing
I feel a degree of regret that Marshall did not push on and say 'abolish the GLC' because I think it would have been a major saving and would have released massive resources for productive use.Collection: Regret
What defines someone's music taste is their teens and early 20s. It's that combination of your sexual awakening and the music of the time, it fixes you forever.Collection: Forever
The idea that the GLC should be abolished at a stroke is ill though out, undemocratic and will cost the people of London dear.Collection: Ideas
To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews.Collection: Government
The British judiciary is one of the most corrupt in the world because of politically active judges.Collection: Judging
I don't just denounce suicide bombers. I denounce those governments which use indiscriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy.Collection: Suicide
When you see someone trying to manoeuvre it round the school gates, you have to think, 'You are a complete idiot.'Collection: School
We look to the left and to the right And we need help but nobody's in sight Where is the man that we all need Tell him he's to come and rescue me.Collection: Men
[Pigeons are] rats with wings.Collection: Wings
There is now a desperate need for a London-wide left caucus of those interested in the GLC and local councils so that we can compare and discuss what is happening in each borough.Collection: Needs
If transport, housing and Olympic projects do not work, I will crawl away under a stone.Collection: Stones
I think George Bush is the most corrupt American president since Harding in the Twenties. He is not the legitimate president. This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown.Collection: Thinking
Only some ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster.Collection: Want
Most kids dont get to go their parents wedding.Collection: Kids
My view is rather than just rage at your impotence you find the best way of achieving as much as you can within whatever constraints there are. It's not the world I would have created but you do what you can within it.Collection: Views
It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself, we want a statue to look like the person.Collection: Art
Boris [Johnson] and Dave [Cameron] gnawed each other's testicles [during the Tory civil war which blighted the EU referendum].Collection: War