Neil Kinnock Quotes

Compassion is not a sloppy sentimental feeling for people who are underprivileged or sick... it is an absolutely practical belief that regardless of a person's background, ability or ability to pay, he should be provided with the best that society has to offer.

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.

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 would die for my country, but I could never let my country die for me.

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

The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

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

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

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

Two negatives don't make a positive, any more than two half-wits make a wit.

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.

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

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 warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old.

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.

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.

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

Someone up there likes me.

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.

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.

Is Tony Blair of the Labour party? The answer to that is profoundly 'yes', but that is not how, sentimentally, he is regarded in the Labour movement generally.

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

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

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

No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.