Quotes from Aneurin Bevan

Reactionary: a man walking backwards with his face to the future.

Poor fellow, he suffers from files.

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.

He [Winston Churchill] is a man suffering from petrified adolescence.

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.

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

There is only one hope for mankind - and that is democratic socialism. There is only one party in Great Britain which can do it - and that is the Labour Party.

The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it

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.

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

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

Politics is a blood sport.

I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.

It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically.

He brings to the fierce struggle of politics the tepid enthusiasm of a lazy summer afternoon at a cricket match.

You call that statesmanship. I call it an emotional spasm.

I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interests.

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.

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

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.

He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind.

The language of priorities is the religion of socialism.

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

I know that the right kind of political leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine.