Quotes from Tony Benn

There is no moral difference between a Stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. They both kill innocent people for political reasons.

If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.

Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you

I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralise them.

An educated, healthy & confident nation is harder to govern

Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters.

I don't make mistakes. I make predictions which immediately turn out to be wrong.

Of course, Mao made his mistakes, because everybody does, but at least he allowed working people to smoke, even in the most trying circumstances, such as when, for one reason or another, they found themselves up before the firing squad.

I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.

When I was seven I got dressed up as a city gent and walked into the Bank of England shouting ' fuck the Pound'.

After fifteen years I have decided to resign my membership of the Dennis The Menace Fanclub. It brought me no benefits worth mentioning.

By the end of his sixteen-course meal in Buckingham Palace, Ramsay McDonald discovered he had changed his mind about the workers owning the means of production. From now on, he felt it better that the Dukes and Duchesses should continue to own the means of production. The workers would just have to make do with what was left over.

He referred to Aneurin Bevan as 'Urinal' Bevan. As for the working classes, they couldn't write their own names in shit on a lavatory wall. I said I thought they could.

I was stunned with outrage.

The Prime Minister keeps me on around here because I make him look good.

Clement Attlee, who looked like a sadistic sanitary inspector...

On the National Executive sat Charles Clarke, looking like a rather manky chimpanzee with his unkempt beard, jug ears and his air of surly aggression.

I think democracy is the most revolutionary thing in the world.

Clare Short, who today poses as an anti-war warrior but was six years ago Blair's cheerleader-in-chief for bombing Yugoslavia. After the attack on Radio-Televizija Jugoslavenska she said, 'The propaganda machine is prolonging the war and it's a legitimate target'. Amnesty International pointed out 'intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects is a war crime under the Rome Statutes of the International Criminal Court'.

You can't have an economic structure worldwide whereby capital can move but labour can't, and if you're going to follow this, then labour must be able to come to wherever it's more profitable. These are the people that are being kept out by the Asylum Bill, on the grounds that they are economic migrants and all of that, but of course all the money that's invested abroad is economic migrant money.

But if there is hope, it lies in ordinary working people. When you put it in words it sounds reasonable: it is when you look at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it becomes an act of faith.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that life is one crushing defeat after another until you just wish Kinnock was dead.