Quotes from Neil Kinnock

Political renegades always start their career of treachery as 'the best men of all parties' and end up in the Tory knackery.

Mobile phones are the only subject on which men boast about who's got the smallest.

Those who have the immense dishonesty to fight with a ballot box in one hand and a rifle in the other have no place in democratic politics.

Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry.

We cannot remove the evils of capitalism without taking its source of power: ownership.

American nuclear weapons would almost certainly start being removed from Britain within 12 months of a Labour government gaining power.

There are politicians who seethe with ambition all the time, and there are a lot of other politicians who don't. I'm in the second category, that's all.

The House of Lords must go - not be reformed, not be replaced, not be reborn in some nominated life-after-death patronage paradise, just closed down, abolished, finished.

I'm the guy everybody wanted to live next door. They just didn't want me to be prime minister.

My first real experience of ambition was as party leader. It was my ambition for Labour to win, in which event I would be prime minister.

I'm prepared to take advice on leisure from Prince Philip. He's a world expert on leisure. He's been practicing it for most of his adult life.

If we are going to have a bicameral parliament, I think there should always be a reserved place for people whose background and experience are critical to the welfare of the nation.

People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby.

Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.

The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.

I'd like to be remembered as somebody who tried to promote justice.

The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

I would die for my country but I could never let my country die for me.

They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow.

Is Tony Blair of the Labour party? The answer to that is profoundly 'yes', but that is not how, sentimentally, he is regarded in the Labour movement generally.

I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.

Newspapers are tutors as well as informers.

Arthur Scargill is the Labour movements nearest equivalent to a First World War General.

The unforgivable political sin is vanity; the killer diet is sour grapes.