Quotes from Dennis Skinner

I still think carefully about what I'm going to say. I use me heart and head technique, in which the heart says, 'get stuck in, Dennis!', and the head says, 'just a minute... ' But I probably don't use this as often as some others.

I'm not going to be putting my expenses on the Internet. I wouldn't know how.

We're allowed to say wonderful things about the Royal Family in the House of Commons. What you're not allowed to say is: anything that might be truthful, but that might upset them. So from time to time I've been pulled up because I've said things which I think are important.

I have worked out that I am living in London on £27 a day while David Cameron is claiming a damn sight more for his big house in Oxford.

I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.

I've never done any cross-party stuff. I've no interest in sitting down discussing pensions or whatever with Tories.

I do rely on my instincts a lot and my imagination.

With this 'social media,' instead of letters you get emails. They're all written in a hurry, with no punctuation, no paragraphs - it's one continual stream, with spelling mistakes. Quite frankly I think it's a world I don't need. But I have to read them all because people say, 'Did you get my letter?' And it's not even a letter!

I used to be very athletic when I was a young man.

When posh boys are in trouble they sack their servants.

I realised that you could get into trouble with a dull speech.

Cameron called me a dinosaur you know? Well I'm the only dinosaur who can ride a bike 12 miles a day.

If I'd not been a coal miner in the past, getting up very early, I wouldn't have been able to have done what I've been doing.

I've never made a perfect speech or a perfect anything. I always think after, I should have done it that way or this way.

In the public sector, there are a million people in the health service. There ought to be a couple of dozen or more on the Labour side, who learned their trade in different parts of the health service, and the public sector, and local government. And bus drivers, and people on the Underground.

To be honest, it was slavery. Nobody should have any romantic ideas about working underground. It's very, very dangerous. You always knew you were living in danger. You were on your hands and knees half the day.

We dragged the National Health Service from the depths of degradation. I've got a United Nations heart bypass to prove it and it was done by a Syrian cardiologist, a Malaysian surgeon, a Dutch doctor and a Nigerian registrar.

I'm up at the crack of dawn.

There are fads in life and old people indulge things to excess sometimes.

I remember at one time there were 44 mining MPs.

I remember arguing with kids on the street who were talking about Santa Claus. I said don't be so daft - Santa Claus doesn't come down our chimney. He's an economic Santa Claus; he goes down chimneys where they've got money.

I did marathons long before they were popular, when people running round the streets were looked at oddly.

I don't believe in organised happiness.

I think if I hadn't been born in a pit village I'd have been part of a dramatic society.