Ken Livingstone Quotes & Sayings

#1. You can't expect to work for the Daily Mail group and have the rest of society treat with you respect as a useful member of society, because you are not.

Ken Livingstone

#2. My political beliefs are my moral, quasi-religious framework.

Ken Livingstone

#3. If women had never been given the right to vote, then Labour would have won every election after the war.

Ken Livingstone

#4. The idea that the GLC should be abolished at a stroke is ill though out, undemocratic and will cost the people of London dear.

Ken Livingstone

#5. I'm an emotional person; I do occasionally shed a tear.

Ken Livingstone

#6. I don't just denounce suicide bombers. I denounce those governments which use indiscriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy.

Ken Livingstone

#7. Most people are not shocked that I am occasionally rude to journalists. They are probably amazed I don't punch one in the face.

Ken Livingstone

#8. I just long for the day when I wake up and find that the Saudi royal family are swinging from lamp-posts.

Ken Livingstone

#9. There isn't much about my life that's been particularly conventional.

Ken Livingstone

#10. This life is messy.

Ken Livingstone

#11. I can only admire people who I have never met and are dead - because you know so much about anyone who is alive.

Ken Livingstone

#12. I feel like Galileo going before the Inquisition to explain that the Sun doesn't revolve around the Earth. I hope I have more success.

Ken Livingstone

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

Ken Livingstone

#14. Short of being prime minister there isn't a better job in British politics than running London.

Ken Livingstone

#15. I think it's much more important to keep people in work than have pay rises.

Ken Livingstone

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

Ken Livingstone

#17. The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations.

Ken Livingstone

#18. 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.

Ken Livingstone

#19. Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz.

Ken Livingstone

#20. Politics is not a game. Thousands of people's jobs and services depended on what the GLC did, and they expected us to do the best we could.

Ken Livingstone

#21. Psephology isn't a hate crime.

Ken Livingstone

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

Ken Livingstone

#23. I feel a degree of regret that Marshall did not push on and say 'abolish the GLC' because I think it would have been a major saving and would have released massive resources for productive use.

Ken Livingstone

#24. When I'm sifting the compost seed or pruning, I argue over issues in my head; I talk to myself.

Ken Livingstone

#25. I have no interest in managing my financial affairs.

Ken Livingstone

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

Ken Livingstone

#27. Yes, there are lots of individual exceptions. But no one has ever done a study about voting intention without ascertaining that the biggest determining factor is your income and your wealth.

Ken Livingstone

#28. I've met serial killers and professional assassins and nobody scared me as much as MrsT.

Ken Livingstone

#29. I think George Bush is the most corrupt American president since Harding in the Twenties. He is not the legitimate president. This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown.

Ken Livingstone

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

Ken Livingstone

#31. I do the gardening.

Ken Livingstone

#32. I grew up in Lambeth, I went to normal schools and I've grown up in a city where people say what they think.

Ken Livingstone

#33. To tackle climate change you don't have to reduce your quality of life, but you do have to change the way you live

Ken Livingstone

#34. Just because I am critical of the coalition doesn't mean I am anti-English. I am just anti-scumbags.

Ken Livingstone

#35. I undertake that, in the exercise of my functions of that office I will have regard to any guidance with respect to ethical standards issued by the secretary of state under Section 66 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999.

Ken Livingstone

#36. There is now a desperate need for a London-wide left caucus of those interested in the GLC and local councils so that we can compare and discuss what is happening in each borough.

Ken Livingstone

#37. I think I have gone through my entire public career never telling a lie. I have made mistakes but I never knowingly lied.

Ken Livingstone

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

Ken Livingstone

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

Ken Livingstone

#40. Consultation is a good thing when people agree with you, and a waste of time when people don't agree with you

Ken Livingstone

#41. If you are running a city you must focus on day-to-day problems.

Ken Livingstone

#42. I would like to sound like James Mason. I reckon if I'd had a better voice I could have been prime minister. It is the most irritating voice in public life.

Ken Livingstone

#43. My administration will tackle these issues in consultation with the black communities of London.

Ken Livingstone

#44. The British judiciary is one of the most corrupt in the world because of politically active judges.

Ken Livingstone

#45. I would like all newspapers to become workers' co-operatives.

Ken Livingstone

#46. I was a weedy kid, not like one of those working-class men who can accommodate not being academically clever by physical strength and prowess.

Ken Livingstone

#47. I loathe and detest all this trivialisation of politics.

Ken Livingstone

#48. Boris [ Johnson]and Dave [Cameron] gnawed each other's testicles [during the Tory civil war which blighted the EU referendum].

Ken Livingstone

#49. Well, I get on with people who believe in something.

Ken Livingstone

#50. Everyone is bisexual. Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything.

Ken Livingstone

#51. 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.

Ken Livingstone

#52. The market is a brilliant system for the exchange of goods and services, but it doesn't protect the environment unless it's regulated, it doesn't train your workforce unless it's regulated, and it doesn't give you the long-term investment you want.

Ken Livingstone

#53. What do we do about climate change bearing down upon us?

Ken Livingstone

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

Ken Livingstone

#55. I actually think the civil service, who are the malignancy at the heart of public life, have consciously prevented, talked ministers out of, made it difficult regulatory-wise, to allow more pressure on alternative energy sources to grow.

Ken Livingstone

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

Ken Livingstone

#57. World wide capitalism kills more people everyday then Hitler did. And he was crazy.

Ken Livingstone

#58. 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.

Ken Livingstone

#59. I have only ever borrowed money for investment. I have been sound money all my life.

Ken Livingstone

#60. When you get into politics, you find that all your worst nightmares about it turn out to be true, and the people who are attracted to large concentrations of power are precisely the ones who should be kept as far away from it as possible.

Ken Livingstone

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

Ken Livingstone

#62. I've always been a workaholic. I reckon, on average, I've had less than one day a year off in my working career.

Ken Livingstone

#63. I take a much more pragmatic view than many people on the Left about working with Neil Kinnock. Kinnock represents the best vehicle possible for achieving socialism now.

Ken Livingstone

#64. My main income is from speaking.

Ken Livingstone

#65. We look to the left and to the right And we need help but nobody's in sight Where is the man that we all need Tell him he's to come and rescue me.

Ken Livingstone

#66. I swim three times a week.

Ken Livingstone

#67. Most kids don't get to go their parents' wedding.

Ken Livingstone

#68. 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.

Ken Livingstone

#69. I mean I get loads of money, all from different sources. You give it to your accountant. They manage it. But you pay corporation tax. If you're then taking it out and spending it on yourself, you have to pay more.

Ken Livingstone

#70. I refuse not to have a sense of humour.

Ken Livingstone

#71. The whole culture of my background was deeply Conservative.

Ken Livingstone

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

Ken Livingstone

#73. You cannot just have a socialist revolution in Norwood and nowhere else.

Ken Livingstone

#74. All the politics of the post-war period was about the clash between the Soviet Union and America, and virtually all issues ended up being subordinated to that. Now, the question is, what is the most a socialist can achieve in a global economy?

Ken Livingstone

#75. I Kenneth Robert Livingstone, having been elected to the office of mayor of London, declare that I take that office upon myself, and will duly and faithfully fulfil the duties of it to the best of my judgement and ability.

Ken Livingstone

#76. I'm more interested in politicians who deal with human rights in their own country rather than lecture the rest of the world.

Ken Livingstone

#77. The American agenda is sweeping everything before it, and although it's not perfect, the EU is better on environmental issues. It's a less rapacious form of capitalism.

Ken Livingstone

#78. The civil service are risk averse.

Ken Livingstone

#79. If I was courting the Muslim vote, I wouldn't have put establishing the partnership ceremony at the forefront of my first term, would I? I go all around London advocating lesbian and gay rights.

Ken Livingstone

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

Ken Livingstone

#81. I could not cherish London and not value Jewish London. The contribution of Jews to London is immense - politically, economically, culturally, intellectually, philanthropically, artistically.

Ken Livingstone

#82. I became a councillor back in 1971, so if by this stage in politics I'm making lots of big mistakes, then I shouldn't be here.

Ken Livingstone

#83. Most people wouldn't want to marry a politician.

Ken Livingstone

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

Ken Livingstone

#85. The press keep asking me, 'What was your biggest mistake?' But if I had made a big mistake, they'd all be writing about it, wouldn't they?

Ken Livingstone

#86. Well, I mean, I'm very much a pragmatic person.

Ken Livingstone

#87. I grew up in a house with very few books.

Ken Livingstone

#88. Most politicians aren't allowed to express themselves any more.

Ken Livingstone

#89. Everyone changes all the time.

Ken Livingstone

#90. Politics is not a healthy lifestyle.

Ken Livingstone

#91. To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews.

Ken Livingstone

#92. Press TV is one of the few TV channels anywhere in the West that fairly presents the Palestinian case.

Ken Livingstone

#93. If I blew my nose the Daily Express and the Daily Mail would say that I am trying to spread germ warfare.

Ken Livingstone

#94. I never came into life with any favours or privileges.

Ken Livingstone

#95. It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the [congestion] charge that everybody else is paying and not actually try and skive out of it like some chiselling little crook.

Ken Livingstone