Quotes from Aneurin Bevan

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.

No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

You don't have to gaze into a crystal ball when you can read an open book.

Virtue is its own punishment.

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets.

If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution.

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.

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.

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.

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.

Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.

No attempt 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.

He refers to a defeat as if it came from God, but a victory as if it came from himself.

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

Just consider, all the little nations running for shelter here and there, one running to Russia and another to the United States. In that situation before anything else would happen, the world will have been polarised between the Soviet Union and the United States. It is against that negative polarisation we have been fighting for years. We want to have the opportunity to interpose between these two giants a moderating, modifying and mitigating diplomacy.

The great Powers of the world today as they look at the armaments they have built up, find themselves hopelessly frustrated. If that be the case, what is the use of speaking about first-class, second-class and third-class Powers? That is surely the wrong language to use. It does not comply with contemporary reality. What we have to seek is new ways of being great, new modes of pioneering, new fashions of thought, new means of inspiring and igniting the minds of mankind. We can do so.

Man must first live before he can live abundantly.