Top 100 Benn Quotes
#1. If I rescued a child from drowning, the press would no doubt headline the story: 'Benn grabs child
Tony Benn
#2. It would give me a terrific sense of satisfaction to be the man who sent both Eubank and Benn into retirement. Benn doesn't need me to tell him that he's over the hill because, deep down, he knows it.
Nigel Benn
#3. The Nigel Benn that beat Doug De Witt would have beaten any middleweight in the world,' says Manny Steward. 'And I mean any middleweight, then, now or any time.
Kevin Mitchell
#4. People from my sort of background needed grammar schools to compete with children from privileged homes like Shirley Williams and Anthony Wedgwood Benn.
Margaret Thatcher
#5. Tony Benn and I were very close, very close friends for 30, 40 years. We talked to each other a great deal, and we were great friends. And I was with him shortly before he died, talking about prospects of the world and prospects for peace. And I'm very sad that he's gone.
Jeremy Corbyn
#6. You were listening to some strangers when you could have benn listening to me talk about myself? Chelsea, how could you?
Leila Sales
#7. I haven't had the recognition I deserve, You can go back to anybody's career - Ricky Hatton, Joe Calzaghe, David Haye, Amir Khan, Chris Eubank, Nigel Benn, Steve Collins, Naseem Hamed. My record is better than all of theirs.
Carl Froch
#8. But as the late socialist politician Tony Benn would often put it, social change is a combination of two things: 'the burning flame of anger at injustice, and the burning flame of hope for a better world'.
Owen Jones
#10. What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you
Tony Benn
#11. Clement Attlee, who looked like a sadistic sanitary inspector...
Tony Benn
#12. All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
Tony Benn
#13. Although socialism is widely held by the establishment to be outdated, the things that are most popular in British society today are little pockets of socialism, where areas of life have been excluded from the crude operation of market forces and are protected for the benefit of the community
Tony Benn
#14. The way a government treats refugees is very instructive ...
Tony Benn
#15. You have to try to build support around causes. It is uniting to campaign on a single issue, and it is never just a single issue; it's always more than that.
Tony Benn
#16. Our changing climate has changed our politics
Hilary Benn
#17. I think if you're going to be committed to doing anything, you really have to care about it, and I suppose that is a romantic idea.
Tony Benn
#18. Britain's continuing membership of the Community would mean the end of Britain as a completely self-governing nation
Tony Benn
#19. I do not share the general view that market forces are the basis for political liberty. Every time I see a homeless person living in a cardboard box in London, I see that person as a victim of market forces. Everytime I see a pensioner who cannot manage, I know that he is a victim of market forces
Tony Benn
#20. When you think of the number of men in the world who hate each other, why, when two men love each other, does the church split?
Tony Benn
#21. The uncut diaries are 16 million words. It's very tiring to do your diary every night before you go to bed.
Tony Benn
#22. I've been a member of the Labour Party sixty five years, and I remain in it, but I think it's all about campaigning for justice and peace, and if you do that, you get a lot of support.
Tony Benn
#23. Of course, Mao made his mistakes, because everybody does, but at least he allowed working people to smoke, even in the most trying circumstances, such as when, for one reason or another, they found themselves up before the firing squad.
Tony Benn
#24. Thanks to the tabloid campaigns I have many death threats and I was very pleased to get another one the other day.
Tony Benn
#25. Through me the energy policy of the whole Common Market is being held up. Without opening old wounds, it pleases me no end.
Tony Benn
#26. There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought, over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up.
Tony Benn
#27. There may be a legal obligation to obey, but there will be no moral obligation to obey. When it comes to history, it will be the people who broke the law for freedom who will be remembered and honoured.
Tony Benn
#28. Making mistakes is part of life. The only things I would feel ashamed of would be if I had said things I hadn't believed in order to get on. Some politicians do do that.
Tony Benn
#29. I don't make mistakes. I make predictions which immediately turn out to be wrong.
Tony Benn
#30. I have had the advantage of a radical Christian upbringing
Tony Benn
#31. I now want more time to devote to politics and more freedom to do so.
Tony Benn
#32. I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralise them.
Tony Benn
#33. He referred to Aneurin Bevan as 'Urinal' Bevan. As for the working classes, they couldn't write their own names in shit on a lavatory wall. I said I thought they could.
Tony Benn
#34. If prayer flew as quickly as gossip, all the saints in heaven could not keep up with it.
James R. Benn
#35. Undoubtedly the war with Iraq was a tragedy. I think it was also a crime.
Tony Benn
#36. I've had a very full life, and I've enjoyed it very much. I've learned a great deal and feel indebted to all the people who have worked so hard.
Tony Benn
#37. He who has money, lives long: he who has authority, can do no wrong: he who has might, establishes right. Such is history! Ecce historia!
Gottfried Benn
#38. The flag of radicalism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen
Tony Benn
#39. Middle class Labour leaders are recaptured by the establishment when they die.
Tony Benn
#40. If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.
Tony Benn
#41. On the National Executive sat Charles Clarke, looking like a rather manky chimpanzee with his unkempt beard, jug ears and his air of surly aggression.
Tony Benn
#42. I believe the more difficult the circumstances, the more people will be inclined to trust those in charge at the moment.
Tony Benn
#43. It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you.
Tony Benn
#44. I always saw myself as a big-nosed, big-eared kid. I've never tried to kind of capitalize on that stuff. I think a lot of people do when they can.
Benn Northover
#45. There is no moral difference between a Stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. They both kill innocent people for political reasons.
Tony Benn
#46. The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin's Russia: it's like blaming Jesus Christ for the Inquisition in Spain.
Tony Benn
#47. People have different ideas of who I am. And I think because I'm very private, people make up the strangest ideas of who and why and what.
Benn Northover
#48. The people who have sacrificed their view in order to get to the top have very often left no footprints in the sands of time.
Tony Benn
#49. I pledge no fudge of compromise', said Arthur Scargill, 'and no carrots of redundancy'. That would make a nice epitaph for him. 'He pledged no fudge'.
Tony Benn
#50. But if there is hope, it lies in ordinary working people. When you put it in words it sounds reasonable: it is when you look at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it becomes an act of faith.
Tony Benn
#51. My day rotates around my family. I am very lucky.
Tony Benn
#52. The Civil Service is a bit like a rusty weathercock. It moves with opinion then it stays where it is until another wind moves it in a different direction
Tony Benn
#53. When we have a majority we will do it. I think the days of the Lords are quite genuinely numbered.
Tony Benn
#55. Everything changed, and eleven months later, here I was in the middle of the night with a gungho major, playing secret agent, hoping some Frenchie didn't put a bullet in my skull before I gave the Germans and Italians their chance.
James R. Benn
#56. We are paying a heavy political price for 20 years in which, as a party, we have played down our criticism of capitalism and soft-peddled our advocacy of socialism
Tony Benn
#57. As each tree falls so does the earth's ability to heal itself and to adapt to the effects of our changing climate
Hilary Benn
#58. I think democracy is the most revolutionary thing in the world ... .because if you have power you use it to meet the needs of you and your community.
Tony Benn
#59. After fifteen years I have decided to resign my membership of the Dennis The Menace Fanclub. It
brought me no benefits worth mentioning.
Tony Benn
#60. It is not surprising that more and more people are coming to the conclusion that the ballot box is no longer an instrument that will secure political solutions ... They can see that the parliamentary democracy we boast of is becoming a sham.
Tony Benn
#61. Never give up hope, that family can be a great source of love, that the eternal inner spirit lives on even when the human body is frail and through positive thinking it can overcome incredible odds. Yes, all of these. But also, that love for others defines us.
Peter Benn
#62. At 5.45 a.m. the important scientists finished their coffee and played rock paper scissors to see who had to phone the government.
Mitch Benn
#63. We have been in recess since July, and during that time there have been a fuel crisis, a Danish no vote, the collapse of the Euro and a war in the middle east, but what is our business tomorrow? The Insolvency Bill [Lords]. It ought be called the Bankruptcy Bill [Commons], because we play no role.
Tony Benn
#64. I've made every mistake - but mistakes are how you learn.
Tony Benn
#65. [I am against] the Treaty of Rome which entrenches laissez faire as its philosophy and chooses bureaucracy as its administrative method.
Tony Benn
#66. Britain is the only colony in the British Empire and it is up to us now to liberate ourselves.
Tony Benn
#67. In developing our industrial strategy for the period ahead, we have the benefit of much experience. Almost everything has been tried at least once
Tony Benn
#68. I think the truth is that the Labour Party isn't believed any more because people suspect it will say anything to get votes. The rebuilding of some radical alternatives to Thatcherism - and by that I mean all-party Thatcherism - will require us to do some very difficult things
Tony Benn
#69. People say that if we work for the Single European Act, women will get their rights, the water will be purer, and training will be better. That is rubbish. It is part of the attempt to consolidate the EEC.
Tony Benn
#70. The present combination of corporate or commercial control theoretically answerable to politically appointed Boards of Governors is not in any sense a democratic enough procedure to control the power the broadcasters have.
Tony Benn
#71. I did not enter the Labour Party 47 years ago to have our manifesto written by Dr Mori, Dr Gallup and Mr Harris
Tony Benn
#72. An MP is the only job where you have 70,000 employers, and only one employee.
Tony Benn
#73. Normally, people give up parliament because they want to do more business or spend more time with family. My wife said 'why don't you say you're giving up to devote more time to politics?'. And it is what I have done.
Tony Benn
#74. There is good and bad in all of us and the Church uses the idea of original sin to control us by saying that, if we do not obey the bishops, we will rot in Hell.
Tony Benn
#75. It would be as unthinkable to try to construct the Labour Party without Marx as it would to be to establish university faculties of astronomy,anthropology or psychology without permitting the study of Copernicus, Darwin or Freud, and still expect such faculties to be taken seriously
Tony Benn
#76. Age does take it out of you, and I haven't the energy I had before. Sometimes I have breakfast and sit in this chair, and I wake up and it is lunchtime. In the past, the idea of sleeping through a morning would have horrified me, but you have to accept the limitations that old age imposes on you.
Tony Benn
#77. The Tory party is the enemy of democracy.
Tony Benn
#78. I've got four lovely children, ten lovely grandchildren, and I left parliament to devote more time to politics, and I think that what is really going on in Britain is a growing sense of alienation. People don't feel anyone listens to them.
Tony Benn
#79. I don't want to commit myself in advocating a definite republican constitution which will get bogged down with the question of who would elect the President and when.
Tony Benn
#80. Resource efficiency - it's about only taking what we need
Hilary Benn
#81. Britain today is suffering from galloping obsolescence.
Tony Benn
#82. Food movement organic food stores supplies health food products and facilitate with instrumental support in organic agriculture.
Tony Benn
#83. Marxism is now a world faith and must be allowed to enter into a continuous dialogue with other world faiths, including religious faiths
Tony Benn
#84. The crisis that we inherit when we come to power will be the occasion for fundamental change and not the excuse for postponing it
Tony Benn
#85. Having served in eleven Parliaments, it would be difficult to describe this as a maiden speech. It would be like Elizabeth Taylor appearing at her next wedding in a white gown.
Tony Benn
#86. It is tempting to deny, but if you deny you confirm what you won't deny.
Tony Benn
#87. I don't believe in the hereditary principle in the House of Lords. Imagine going to the dentist, sitting in the chair and he says, 'I'm not a dentist myself, but my father was a dentist and his father before him. Now, open wide!
Tony Benn
#88. It is obvious I shall have to abandon my hopes of getting the Queen's head off the stamps.
Tony Benn
#89. The Prime Minister keeps me on around here because I make him look good.
Tony Benn
#90. Democracy is not just voting every 5 years and watching 'Big Brother' in between and wondering why nothing happens. Democracy is what we do and say where we live and work
Tony Benn
#91. The one thing that is absolutely essential is that there shouldn't be any governmental control [of the media] directly or indirectly.
Tony Benn
#92. Workers are not going to be fobbed off with a few shares ... or by a carbon copy of the German system of co-determination.
Tony Benn
#93. It is government policy to phase out subsidies to nationalised industries. In line with this, the government hopes that the coal industry will be able to operate without the need for assistance apart from social grants.
Tony Benn
#94. People in debt become hopeless and hopeless people don't vote. They always say that that everyone should vote but I think that if the poor in Britain or the United States turned out and voted for people that represented their interests there would be a real democratic revolution.
Tony Benn
#95. Someone comes every morning at nine o'clock to see if I am still alive. I do get lonely, yes, but I have the children who come and see me. I see all my children every week, and there are the grandchildren, too.
Tony Benn
#96. Except for a roll of Harding's eyes, everyone ignored me, which is the way I liked it when I had to hang around with senior officers. They had a way of thinking up ideas that got you killed and them promoted.
James R. Benn
#97. My youth is like a scab: under it there is a wound that every day leaks blood. It disfigures me.
Gottfried Benn
#98. Anyone from abroad will tell you that it is the class system that really lies at the root of our problems, economic and industrial. The House of Lords symbolises that.
Tony Benn
#99. Choice depends on the freedom to choose and if you are shackled with debt you don't have the freedom to choose.
Tony Benn
#100. It is wholly wrong to blame Marx for what was done in his name, as it is to blame Jesus for what was done in his
Tony Benn
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