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. She curled sideways into the milky light of the bedside lamp and began to read.

Sara Sheridan

#3. Scripts are what matter. If you get the foundations right and then you get the right ingredients on top, you stand a shot ... but if you get those foundations wrong, then you absolutely don't stand a shot. It's very rare-almost never-that a good film gets made from a bad screenplay.

Tim Bevan

#4. There's a certain magic about writing even when the characters refuse to act the way I want them to.

Gloria Bevan

#5. 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

#6. He seems determined to make a trumpet sound like a tin whistle.

Aneurin Bevan

#7. I am two of the most powerful words; for what you put after them shapes your reality.

Bevan Lee

#8. He (Aneurin Bevan) enjoys prophesying the imminent fall of the capitalist system, and is prepared to play a part, any part, in its burial, except that of mute.

Harold Macmillan

#9. We should not be pushing out figured when the facts are in the opposite direction.

Aneurin Bevan

#10. The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

Aneurin Bevan

#11. 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

#12. The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do.

Aneurin Bevan

#13. 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

#14. Oh my heavens!" said Julian's disembodied voice. "I seem to have pulled my big meaty hamstring! However will I deliver this basket of raw human flesh to the orphanage?

Robert Bevan

#15. This is my truth, tell me yours.

Aneurin Bevan

#16. 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

#17. A chap's impending death has a way of focusing the mind.

Sara Sheridan

#18. If you put Mirabelle into some of the situations she gets into, there is only one way Mirabelle can behave.

Sara Sheridan

#19. When she first moved to Brighton, the flat on the Lawns had felt luxurious and it had seemed as if she was settling down, sleeping in the same bed every night, the darkness uninterrupted by any hint of emergency. It had felt as if all her difficulties were over.

Sara Sheridan

#20. Mirabelle sat down, dropping into the cushions like a ball being caught in a large leather glove.

Sara Sheridan

#21. Discontent arises from a knowledge of the possible, as contrasted with the actual.

Aneurin Bevan

#22. You call that statesmanship. I call it an emotional spasm.

Aneurin Bevan

#23. 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

#24. It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically.

Aneurin Bevan

#25. Advertising is 'an evil service'.

Aneurin Bevan

#26. Buildings are not political but are politicized by why and how they are built, regarded and destroyed.

Robert Bevan

#27. Without false modetsy, I don't think I have a fraction of the talent of either Bevan of Foot.

Neil Kinnock

#28. Any additional spotlight you can put onto an opening of a film is a great thing to get.

Tim Bevan

#29. There can be no immaculate conception of socialism.

Aneurin Bevan

#30. The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.

Aneurin Bevan

#31. So what if she wasn't a pushover? So what if she had some mettle and didn't wear her heart on her sleeve? She had done everything she had done for the best. For king and country.

Sara Sheridan

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Poor fellow, he suffers from files.

Aneurin Bevan

#35. A chap wouldn't hole up in Occupied France just to get away from his wife, Vesta.

Sara Sheridan

#36. I know that the right kind of political leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine.

Aneurin Bevan

#37. When life gives you a lemon, it's time for a Cowgirl's Prayer." This was one of her favorite alcoholic concoctions of tequila, lime juice and lemonade.

Brenda Bevan Remmes

#38. Reactionary: a man walking backwards with his face to the future.

Aneurin Bevan

#39. Virtue is its own punishment.

Aneurin Bevan

#40. I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.

Aneurin Bevan

#41. The language of priorities is the religion of socialism.

Aneurin Bevan

#42. Oh come on man," said Dave. "That's seriously not cool. You're supposed to ride those, not use them as meat shields."

Robert Bevan

#43. He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind.

Aneurin Bevan

#44. This investigation felt difficult, like driving in fog.

Sara Sheridan

#45. 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

#46. Knowing what you want to do and then what you have to do to make it happen is one big difference between adult creativity and child's play.

Rob Bevan

#47. I read the newspaper avidly.
It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Aneurin Bevan

#48. Didn't young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?

Sara Sheridan

#49. She tried to focus on the element of riddle or at least puzzle contained in the letter and ignore the sense of doom that was sweeping through her like clouds rolling to the shore over open water.

Sara Sheridan

#50. Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.

Aneurin Bevan

#51. The hero's need of the people outlasts their need of him.

Aneurin Bevan

#52. The world is changing and you're only just becoming accustomed to it. You're changing, I suppose. You've changed since I've known you.'
'How?'
'You've come more alive.

Sara Sheridan

#53. Stand not too near the rich man lest he destroy thee - and not too far away lest he forget thee.

Aneurin Bevan

#54. Whereas Mirabelle is tall, thin and sad, Vesta is physically and emotionally her opposite.

Sara Sheridan

#55. Trade unions are islands of anarchy in a sea of chaos.

Aneurin Bevan

#56. Can I fetch you something, madam? A cup of tea?'
In the old days she'd have been 'miss' and he'd have offered her a cocktail.

Sara Sheridan

#57. 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

#58. There are two ways of getting into the Cabinet - you can crawl in or kick your way in.

Aneurin Bevan

#59. We can call the attempt to refute theism by displaying the continuity of belief in God with primitive delusions the method of Anthropological intimidation.

Edwyn Bevan

#60. Why should I question the monkey when I can question the organ grinder.

Aneurin Bevan

#61. If there's one shade a woman of colour can't wear it's got to be the one everyone expects, hasn't it?

Sara Sheridan

#62. The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it

Aneurin Bevan

#63. He [Winston Churchill] is a man suffering from petrified adolescence.

Aneurin Bevan

#64. Why, that means you're just a ... busybody. You could be anyone. You could be a journalist.'

Sara Sheridan

#65. No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

Aneurin Bevan

#66. I like you in green,' he said. 'You look as if you're a very beautiful imp.'

Sara Sheridan

#67. Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets

Aneurin Bevan

#68. He brings to the fierce struggle of politics the tepid enthusiasm of a lazy summer afternoon at a cricket match.

Aneurin Bevan

#69. Mirabelle and Vesta have plenty in common because they are facing descrimination in different ways, but they're also a nice contrast.

Sara Sheridan

#70. We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over!

Aneurin Bevan

#71. [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

#72. Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

Aneurin Bevan

#73. A Society in which the people's wants do not exceed their possessions is not a Socialist society.

Aneurin Bevan

#74. 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

#75. While his brain lay slowly dying, Bevan felt his body come back to life.

Stephanie Bedwell-Grime

#76. Damn it all you can't have the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver.

Aneurin Bevan

#77. Lord Marshmoreton: I wish I could get you see my point of view.
George Bevan: I do see your point of view. But dimly. You see, my own takes up such a lot of the foreground

P.G. Wodehouse

#78. If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution.

Aneurin Bevan

#79. Politics is a blood sport.

Aneurin Bevan

#80. Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn't true.

Sara Sheridan

#81. 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

#82. It is not possible to create peace in the Middle East by jeopardizing the peace of the world.

Aneurin Bevan

#83. You don't have to gaze into a crystal ball when you can read an open book.

Aneurin Bevan

#84. 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