Neil Kinnock Quotes

Devolutionary reform will not provide a factory, a machine or jobs, build a school, train a doctor or put a pound on pensions.

The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

The House of Lords must go - not be reformed, not be replaced, not be reborn in some nominated life-after-death patronage paradise, just closed down, abolished, finished.

I'm the guy everybody wanted to live next door. They just didn't want me to be prime minister.

American nuclear weapons would almost certainly start being removed from Britain within 12 months of a Labour government gaining power.

I must emphasise that there is nothing in the Labour Party constituion that could, or should prevent people from holding opinions which favour Leninist-Trotskyism. Certainly Marxism has, and will continue to have an important function in the Labour Party.

The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.

There are politicians who seethe with ambition all the time, and there are a lot of other politicians who don't. I'm in the second category, that's all.

They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow.

Those who have the immense dishonesty to fight with a ballot box in one hand and a rifle in the other have no place in democratic politics.

At various times in the next 20 or 30 years I think it reasonable to anticipate that I will be among the leadershp of the Labour Party, but as far as being leader, I can't see it happening, and I'm not particularly keen on it happening.

I'm prepared to take advice on leisure from Prince Philip. He's a world expert on leisure. He's been practicing it for most of his adult life.

People, even independently minded people, do to an extent draw their impressions from what they are told, especially if they are told it incessantly by newspapers.

Arthur Scargill is the Labour movements nearest equivalent to a First World War General.

I?m not even sure I?d go into a reformed House of Lords. But let?s put it like this, the decision would have been easier had there been not even complete reform but a substantial stride.

I take notice of those who have argued consistently for the modernisation of the E.U., but so many of the skeptics in Britain are just hostile to the whole European idea.

I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.

Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.

That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion.

We cannot remove the evils of capitalism without taking its source of power: ownership.

Political renegades always start their career of treachery as 'the best men of all parties' and end up in the Tory knackery.

Someone up there likes me.

[Marx's theories] gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.

I am the first male member of my family for about three generations who can have reasonable confidence in expecting that I will leave this earth with more or less the same number of fingers, hands, legs, toes and eyes as I had when I was born.

I want to retire at 50. I want to play cricket in the summer and geriatric football in the winter, and sing in the choir.

Without false modetsy, I don't think I have a fraction of the talent of either Bevan of Foot.

The trouble with the Socialist Workers Party is that they live in an historical thermos-flask.

Margaret Thatcher was not a malicious person. She was a person who couldn't see, or didn't want to see, the unfairness and disadvantaging consequences of the application of what she thought to be a renewing ideology.

Harold Wilson is a petty bourgeois and will remain so in spirit even if they make him a Viscount.

People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby.

Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry.

Mobile phones are the only subject on which men boast about who's got the smallest.

The unforgivable political sin is vanity; the killer diet is sour grapes.

Resentment is an extremely bitter diet, I have no desire to make my own toxins.

We must not look for some kind of Messiah.

Newspapers are tutors as well as informers.