Top 51 Aneurin Bevan Quotes
#1. I am not going to spend any time whatsoever in attacking the Foreign Secretary. If we complain about the tune, there is no reason to attack the monkey when the organ grinder is present.
Aneurin Bevan
#2. 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.
Aneurin Bevan
#3. He seems determined to make a trumpet sound like a tin whistle.
Aneurin Bevan
#4. We should not be pushing out figured when the facts are in the opposite direction.
Aneurin Bevan
#5. The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.
Aneurin Bevan
#6. The Prime Minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights debates like a war and the war like a debate.
Aneurin Bevan
#7. The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do.
Aneurin Bevan
#9. Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the 'greatest good for the greatest number' can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual.
Aneurin Bevan
#10. Discontent arises from a knowledge of the possible, as contrasted with the actual.
Aneurin Bevan
#11. You call that statesmanship. I call it an emotional spasm.
Aneurin Bevan
#12. 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.
Aneurin Bevan
#13. It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically.
Aneurin Bevan
#15. There can be no immaculate conception of socialism.
Aneurin Bevan
#16. The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.
Aneurin Bevan
#17. What should be the glory of the profession is that a doctor should be able to meet his patients with no financial anxiety.
Aneurin Bevan
#18. 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
Aneurin Bevan
#20. I know that the right kind of political leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine.
Aneurin Bevan
#21. Reactionary: a man walking backwards with his face to the future.
Aneurin Bevan
#23. I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.
Aneurin Bevan
#24. The language of priorities is the religion of socialism.
Aneurin Bevan
#25. He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind.
Aneurin Bevan
#26. Listening to a speech by [Neville] Chamberlain is like paying a visit to Woolworth's, everything in its place and nothing above sixpence.
Aneurin Bevan
#27. I read the newspaper avidly.
It is my one form of continuous fiction.
Aneurin Bevan
#28. Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.
Aneurin Bevan
#29. The hero's need of the people outlasts their need of him.
Aneurin Bevan
#30. Stand not too near the rich man lest he destroy thee - and not too far away lest he forget thee.
Aneurin Bevan
#31. Trade unions are islands of anarchy in a sea of chaos.
Aneurin Bevan
#32. The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the Right Honorable Gentleman for four and a half years.
Aneurin Bevan
#33. There are two ways of getting into the Cabinet - you can crawl in or kick your way in.
Aneurin Bevan
#34. Why should I question the monkey when I can question the organ grinder.
Aneurin Bevan
#35. The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it
Aneurin Bevan
#36. He [Winston Churchill] is a man suffering from petrified adolescence.
Aneurin Bevan
#37. No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.
Aneurin Bevan
#38. Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets
Aneurin Bevan
#39. He brings to the fierce struggle of politics the tepid enthusiasm of a lazy summer afternoon at a cricket match.
Aneurin Bevan
#40. We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over!
Aneurin Bevan
#41. [Winston Churchill] never spares himself in conversation. He gives himself so generously that hardly anyone else is permitted to give anything in his presence.
Aneurin Bevan
#42. Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.
Aneurin Bevan
#43. A Society in which the people's wants do not exceed their possessions is not a Socialist society.
Aneurin Bevan
#44. 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.
Aneurin Bevan
#45. Damn it all you can't have the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver.
Aneurin Bevan
#46. If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution.
Aneurin Bevan
#48. The Tories always hold the view that the state is an apparatus for the protection of the swag of the property owners ... Christ drove the money changers out of the temple, but you inscribe their title deed on the altar cloth.
Aneurin Bevan
#49. It is not possible to create peace in the Middle East by jeopardizing the peace of the world.
Aneurin Bevan
#50. You don't have to gaze into a crystal ball when you can read an open book.
Aneurin Bevan
#51. 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.
Aneurin Bevan
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
