Michael Foot Quotes

#1. I have never been in favour of expelling people from the Labour Party.

Michael Foot

#2. All is fair in love and war and Parliamentary procedure.

Michael Foot

#3. A Britain which denounced the insanity of the nuclear strategy would be in a position to direct its influence at the United Nations and in the world at large, in a manner at present denied us

Michael Foot

#4. Of course my father was a great influence on me. He taught me how to read.

Michael Foot

#5. The only man I knew who could make a curse sound like a caress.

Michael Foot

#6. Politicians live in little worlds of their own and imagine they are the universe.

Michael Foot

#7. Men of power have not time to read, yet men who do not read are not fit for power.

Michael Foot

#8. The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time under the bed looking for communists that they haven't had the time to look in the bed.

Michael Foot

#9. A speech from Ernest Bevin on a major occasion had all the horrific fascination of a public execution. If the mind was left immune, eyes and ears and emotions were riveted.

Michael Foot

#10. A Royal Commission is a broody hen sitting on a china egg.

Michael Foot

#11. Is the Labour Party to remain a democratic party in which the right of free criticism and free debate is not merely tolerated but encouraged? Or are the rank and file of the party to be bludgeoned or cowed into an uncritical subservience towards the leadership?

Michael Foot

#12. No rising hope on the political scene who offered his services to Labour when I happened to be its leader can be dismissed as an opportunist.

Michael Foot

#13. In my opinion, Marxism is a great creed of human liberation. It is the creed which says that when all other empires fade and vanish, our business is to enlarge the empire of the human mind

Michael Foot

#14. [There are] judges who stretch the law ... to suit reactionary attitudes.

Michael Foot

#15. People can say what they want in the Labour Party.

Michael Foot

#16. Think of it! A second chamber selected by the Whips. A seraglio of eunuchs.

Michael Foot

#17. Socialism without public ownership is nothing but a fantastic apology

Michael Foot

#18. She has no imagination and that means no compassion.

Michael Foot

#19. I've been on the left of the Party since I joined it about 1934 and I haven't seen much reason for altering ... I have always been a strong libertarian both inside the Labour Party and outside ... what I want to seek to do over a period of course is to establish a Socialist society.

Michael Foot

#20. He's passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever.

Michael Foot

#21. Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power.

Michael Foot

#22. People must learn more and more that the strength of this country is the democratic power of the trade union movement

Michael Foot

#23. Disraeli was my favourite Tory. He was an adventurer pure and simple, or impure and complex. I'm glad to say Gladstone got the better of him.

Michael Foot

#24. The national strike of the miners in 1972 performed, I believe, a great service, not only to the miners, but the people in Britain today who wanted coal

Michael Foot

#25. It does so happen to be the case that if the freedom of the people of this country-and especially the rights of trade unionists-if those precious things in the past had been left to the good sense and fairmindedness of judges, we would have precious few freedoms in this country.

Michael Foot