Quotes from Ken Livingstone

I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself - the working-class tradition of self-education.

When I was leader of the GLC, by the time I had been in control for three years, the difference in pay between the cleaner and the director general was a four-to-one ratio. I find that attractive.

Everyone changes all the time.

What defines someone's music taste is their teens and early 20s. It's that combination of your sexual awakening and the music of the time, it fixes you forever.

I refuse not to have a sense of humour.

My only regret is the media's obsession with the past.

Give me the whole world to run and then I'll be happy. If tomorrow I was told I had to sort out the whole world's problems I'd sleep like a baby.

I'm never going to take the view that I should say whatever I need to say in order to achieve something. Because that implies a level of dishonesty.

I've never declined to do an interview.

The truth is, no one pays more tax than they have to.

I've always told the truth. I've often been wrong - but I've never knowingly lied. Not in public life. Because I don't see the need to.

I'd love to write about my growing sexual awareness, but the press would turn it into something squalid.

Working with the Jewish community is essential to me and what I stand for.

I do explicitly see Jewish people as a people - not either a religion or an ethnicity but a people.

You lose power in Britain and you are just Joe Public again.

I'm in exactly the same position as everybody else who has a small business.

The people I really most admire are Robert Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. If you know someone, it is very hard to revere them.

It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself, we want a statue to look like the person.

I am a socialist, a believer in rational thought and the rule of law.

This life is messy.

There needs to be radical development in equality law to create the environment to allow women to stay in work.

Polling in a general election is pretty accurate, because turnout is usually high.

Only some ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster.

Every year the international finance system kills more people than the Second World War. But at least Hitler was mad, you know.