Ken Livingstone Quotes

I'm never going to take the view that I should say whatever I need to say in order to achieve something. Because that implies a level of dishonesty.

When I'm sifting the compost seed or pruning, I argue over issues in my head; I talk to myself.

If I blew my nose the Daily Express and the Daily Mail would say that I am trying to spread germ warfare.

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.

I'm in exactly the same position as everybody else who has a small business.

I undertake that, in the exercise of my functions of that office I will have regard to any guidance with respect to ethical standards issued by the secretary of state under Section 66 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999.

Working with the Jewish community is essential to me and what I stand for.

I loathe and detest all this trivialisation of politics.

I don't just denounce suicide bombers. I denounce those governments which use indiscriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy.

I actually think the civil service, who are the malignancy at the heart of public life, have consciously prevented, talked ministers out of, made it difficult regulatory-wise, to allow more pressure on alternative energy sources to grow.

Most politicians aren't allowed to express themselves any more.

I could not cherish London and not value Jewish London. The contribution of Jews to London is immense - politically, economically, culturally, intellectually, philanthropically, artistically.

I Kenneth Robert Livingstone, having been elected to the office of mayor of London, declare that I take that office upon myself, and will duly and faithfully fulfil the duties of it to the best of my judgement and ability.

Most people wouldn't want to marry a politician.

I do explicitly see Jewish people as a people - not either a religion or an ethnicity but a people.

Just because I am critical of the coalition doesn't mean I am anti-English. I am just anti-scumbags.

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.

I've met serial killers and professional assassins and nobody scared me as much as MrsT.

The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations.

Global warming could be solved by shifting three to four per cent of global GDP to pay for it.

Most people are not shocked that I am occasionally rude to journalists. They are probably amazed I don't punch one in the face.

I would like to sound like James Mason. I reckon if I'd had a better voice I could have been prime minister. It is the most irritating voice in public life.

I feel like Galileo going before the Inquisition to explain that the Sun doesn't revolve around the Earth. I hope I have more success.

I'm an emotional person; I do occasionally shed a tear.

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.

I've always told the truth. I've often been wrong - but I've never knowingly lied. Not in public life. Because I don't see the need to.

I've always been a workaholic. I reckon, on average, I've had less than one day a year off in my working career.

Well, I mean, I'm very much a pragmatic person.

There needs to be radical development in equality law to create the environment to allow women to stay in work.

When you get into politics, you find that all your worst nightmares about it turn out to be true, and the people who are attracted to large concentrations of power are precisely the ones who should be kept as far away from it as possible.

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.

When I was leader of the GLC, by the time I had been in control for three years, the difference in pay between the cleaner and the director general was a four-to-one ratio. I find that attractive.

Everyone is bisexual. Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything.

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.

The people I really most admire are Robert Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. If you know someone, it is very hard to revere them.

I think I have gone through my entire public career never telling a lie. I have made mistakes but I never knowingly lied.

Psephology isn't a hate crime.

The whole culture of my background was deeply Conservative.

You can't expect to work for the Daily Mail group and have the rest of society treat with you respect as a useful member of society, because you are not.

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.

The market is a brilliant system for the exchange of goods and services, but it doesn't protect the environment unless it's regulated, it doesn't train your workforce unless it's regulated, and it doesn't give you the long-term investment you want.

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.

I do the gardening.

I employed my wife for three years to sit in the attic and type up my autobiography, 700 pages, organise everywhere I go. I'm paying the normal rate of tax on the money I take out for myself.

I've got people handling the media. I employ at the moment two people. No-one is paying income tax on the money they use to employ people.

I think it's much more important to keep people in work than have pay rises.

Boris [ Johnson]and Dave [Cameron] gnawed each other's testicles [during the Tory civil war which blighted the EU referendum].

Polling in a general election is pretty accurate, because turnout is usually high.

I have met the people who run the world, and I am not in awe of them.

Well, I get on with people who believe in something.

Jewish voters are not one homogenous block.

To tackle climate change you don't have to reduce your quality of life, but you do have to change the way you live

I'm more interested in politicians who deal with human rights in their own country rather than lecture the rest of the world.

My main income is from speaking.

My administration will tackle these issues in consultation with the black communities of London.

I can only admire people who I have never met and are dead - because you know so much about anyone who is alive.

The problem is that many MPs never see the London that exists beyond the wine bars and brothels of Westminster.

The civil service are risk averse.

I never came into life with any favours or privileges.

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.

You cannot just have a socialist revolution in Norwood and nowhere else.

All the politics of the post-war period was about the clash between the Soviet Union and America, and virtually all issues ended up being subordinated to that. Now, the question is, what is the most a socialist can achieve in a global economy?

I would like all newspapers to become workers' co-operatives.

If I was courting the Muslim vote, I wouldn't have put establishing the partnership ceremony at the forefront of my first term, would I? I go all around London advocating lesbian and gay rights.

I liked it when we had ugly politicians who droned on about issues.

There isn't much about my life that's been particularly conventional.

I don't work hard enough. If I had worked harder I might have been prime minister.

You lose power in Britain and you are just Joe Public again.

My political beliefs are my moral, quasi-religious framework.

Every budget I have ever prepared has been balanced.

Yes, there are lots of individual exceptions. But no one has ever done a study about voting intention without ascertaining that the biggest determining factor is your income and your wealth.

Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office. Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres.

Every year the international finance system kills more people than the Second World War. But at least Hitler was mad, you know.

I swim three times a week.

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.

I grew up in Lambeth, I went to normal schools and I've grown up in a city where people say what they think.

If women had never been given the right to vote, then Labour would have won every election after the war.

Most kids don't get to go their parents' wedding.

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.

I have opened newspapers and read incredible lies.

Anybody who enjoys being in the House of Commons probably needs psychiatric help.

The idea that the GLC should be abolished at a stroke is ill though out, undemocratic and will cost the people of London dear.

Only some ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster.

I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself - the working-class tradition of self-education.

This life is messy.