Quotes by Aneurin Bevan

“Reactionary: A man walking backwards with his face to the future.”

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

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

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

“This island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish in Great Britain at the same time.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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 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.”

“If you carry this resolution and follow out all its implications and do not run away from it, you will send a Foreign Secretary, whoever he was, naked into the conference chamber.”

“Politics is a blood sport.”

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

“Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.”

“Poor fellow, he suffers from files.”

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

“Virtue is its own punishment”

“The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you havent got a programme, a bogy man will do.”