Aneurin Bevan Quotations

Reactionary: a man walking backwards with his face to the future.

The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.

The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do.

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.

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.

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.

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

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 Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

Stand not too near the rich man lest he destroy thee - and not too far away lest he forget thee.

He seems determined to make a trumpet sound like a tin whistle.

Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.

I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.

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.

I know that the right kind of political leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine.

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.

It is not possible to create peace in the Middle East by jeopardizing the peace of the world.

It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically.

No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

Damn it all you can't have the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver.

The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it

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.

Politics is a blood sport.

Why should I question the monkey when I can question the organ grinder.

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets

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

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.

This is my truth, tell me yours.

What should be the glory of the profession is that a doctor should be able to meet his patients with no financial anxiety.

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.

Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

Discontent arises from a knowledge of the possible, as contrasted with the actual.

The Prime Minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights debates like a war and the war like a debate.

In Germany democracy died by the headman's axe. In Britain it can be by pernicious anaemia.

I welcome this opportunity of pricking the bloated bladder of lies with the poniard of truth

You don't have to gaze into a crystal ball when you can read an open book.

There are two ways of getting into the Cabinet - you can crawl in or kick your way in.

Advertising is 'an evil service'.

The language of priorities is the religion of socialism.

Virtue is its own punishment.

If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution.

[Winston Churchill] never spares himself in conversation. He gives himself so generously that hardly anyone else is permitted to give anything in his presence.

The hero's need of the people outlasts their need of him.

He brings to the fierce struggle of politics the tepid enthusiasm of a lazy summer afternoon at a cricket match.

There is only one hope for mankind — and that is democratic Socialism.

Listening to a speech by [Neville] Chamberlain is like paying a visit to Woolworth's, everything in its place and nothing above sixpence.

Poor fellow, he suffers from files.

The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the Right Honorable Gentleman for four and a half years.

Trade unions are islands of anarchy in a sea of chaos.

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.

We should not be pushing out figured when the facts are in the opposite direction.

A Society in which the people's wants do not exceed their possessions is not a Socialist society.

You call that statesmanship. I call it an emotional spasm.

He [Winston Churchill] is a man suffering from petrified adolescence.

There can be no immaculate conception of socialism.

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.

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.

He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind.

Now, the vicissitudes that afflict the individual have their source in society. It is this situation that has given currency to the phrase social forces. Personal relations have given way to impersonal ones. The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control. The study of how it is to be done is the function of politics.

You're not an M.P., you're a gastronomic pimp.