Denis Healey Quotes

#1. Denis Healey refused to contribute an article to the 'Guardian' about his intentions, and was punished by the electorate - and then all Labour MPs - for his presumption in assuming they already knew everything about him. He became famously the best prime minister we never had. Perhaps.

Simon Hoggart

#2. Trying to create a sense of common interest does involve getting people actually to work together on common problems. It can't be created by law, that's why I disagree with the liberal approach becuase it's essentially a lawyer's approach.

Denis Healey

#3. World events do not occur by accident. They are made to happen, whether it is to do with national issues or commerce; and most of them are staged and managed by those who hold the purse strings.

Denis Healey

#4. I've got a happy marriage, which is the most important singular thing.

Denis Healey

#5. I never thought I would get married. I didn't think I was that type of person.

Heather Brooke

#6. Karl Marx himself preferred a glass of claret to the mug of tea affected by some of his recent converts.

Denis Healey

#7. You've got to pick your roles really carefully. It's a lot more fun to play a layered woman, than just someone where what you see is what you get, by far.

Melissa George

#8. I often compare Margaret Thatcher with Florence Nightingale. She stalks through the wards of our hospitals as a lady with a lamp. Unfortunately, it's a blowlamp.

Denis Healey

#9. Leaving. That was the word she liked to use. Not going away, which implied a return, but leaving, which implied a jet plane.

Emma Straub

#10. When you're in a hole, stop digging.

Denis Healey

#11. It is a good thing to follow the First Law of Holes: if you are in one, stop digging.

Denis Healey

#12. War inside countries is all too common.

Denis Healey

#13. Conceive your dreams.
Believe in your dreams.
Pursue your dreams.
Achieve your dreams.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#14. We cannot hope to achieve full employment and sustain it until we have mastered inflation.

Denis Healey

#15. The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall.

Denis Healey

#16. I tried self-sacrifice a couple of times in my youth.

Mason Cooley

#17. I've always criticised American policy when I've disagreed with it. Just as I've criticised British policy. I was violently anti-Suez and pro-American in 1956, just as I was violently anti-Soviet on the invasion of Hungary which took place at the same time.

Denis Healey

#18. If any one shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people by his own authority and without such consent of the people, he thereby invades the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government.

John Locke

#19. The right hon. Gentleman will be known for ever as the only Chancellor in the post-war period who brought this country to the brink of bankruptcy.

Denis Healey

#20. The fulfillment of the cultural mandate involves hard work, and men need to be hard in order to do the work.

Douglas Wilson

#21. Unless you understand the history of a situation, you can't ever hope to solve problems.

Denis Healey

#22. Nothing is more dangerous that the politician who uses politics as a surrogate for an unsatisfactory personal life.

Denis Healey

#23. To me, activism requires you to try very hard to open your eyes to the world as it is. See as much as you can, knowing that whatever you see is going to be partial. That you possess a partial consciousness in an infinite and expanding universe.

Bill Ayers

#24. Squeeze the rich until the pips squeak

Denis Healey

#25. Being attacked by him is like being savaged by a dead sheep.

Denis Healey

#26. Healey's First Law Of Holes: When in one, stop digging.

Denis Healey

#27. Well!' I said. 'And suppose I had come round after?'
'I like you more better now,' said she.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#28. There is very little sense that anybody really knows what works or why. But that's not a shock. And I don't think market research would solve that.

Charlie Huston

#29. It is on account of the ego that one is not able to see God. In front of the door of God's mansion lies the stump of ego. One cannot enter the mansion without jumping over the stump.

Ramakrishna

#30. An aircraft which is used by wealthy people on their expense accounts, whose fares are subsidized by much poorer taxpayers.

Denis Healey

#31. The Americans have a very active presence and policy in every single part of the world and if we broke with them, we would lose any possibility of influencing them. They would go in for global unilateralism, and the world would be a more dangerous place.

Denis Healey

#32. You don't know what you're talking about," he says. "And you shouldn't talk about things you know nothing about.

Lauren Barnholdt

#33. One thing you try not to do as a father, as a coach, is pressure your son to do something that you've done. You don't just keep saying, "this is what I've done, this is what I've done." You have to take a little piece at a time.

Patrick Willis

#34. Many of us in the West have come to feel that the development of technology in the military and economic fields has produced a single world in which the central problems, both military and economic, are going to require co-operation rather than continued confrontation and competition.

Denis Healey