Aneurin Bevan Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

This is my truth, tell me yours.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Politics is a blood sport.

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