Kinnock Quotes

#1. 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

#2. I always knew that Neil Kinnock belonged in the economic nursery. Now, God help us we've got twins.

Michael Heseltine

#3. The Labour Party is being led by a woman but she has not been elected to anything. She is the lady who makes the breakfast in the Kinnock household.

Edwina Currie

#4. Neil Kinnock's speeches go on for so long because he has nothing to say and so he has no way of knowing when he's finished saying it.

John Major

#5. I'd love to play Neil Kinnock. Because of my ginger hair, I thought that was a possibility. He's a hero and a villain in most people's eyes, but I'd like to do that, I think I'd be right for it.

Jason Flemyng

#6. Mobile phones are the only subject on which men boast about who's got the smallest.

Neil Kinnock

#7. At various times in the next 20 or 30 years I think it reasonable to anticipate that I will be among the leadershp of the Labour Party, but as far as being leader, I can't see it happening, and I'm not particularly keen on it happening.

Neil Kinnock

#8. People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby.

Neil Kinnock

#9. I take notice of those who have argued consistently for the modernisation of the E.U., but so many of the skeptics in Britain are just hostile to the whole European idea.

Neil Kinnock

#10. I?m not even sure I?d go into a reformed House of Lords. But let?s put it like this, the decision would have been easier had there been not even complete reform but a substantial stride.

Neil Kinnock

#11. We must not look for some kind of Messiah.

Neil Kinnock

#12. Is Tony Blair of the Labour party? The answer to that is profoundly 'yes', but that is not how, sentimentally, he is regarded in the Labour movement generally.

Neil Kinnock

#13. The unforgivable political sin is vanity; the killer diet is sour grapes.

Neil Kinnock

#14. Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.

Neil Kinnock

#15. Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry.

Neil Kinnock

#16. [Marx's theories] gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.

Neil Kinnock

#17. There are politicians who seethe with ambition all the time, and there are a lot of other politicians who don't. I'm in the second category, that's all.

Neil Kinnock

#18. Arthur Scargill is the Labour movements nearest equivalent to a First World War General.

Neil Kinnock

#19. They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow.

Neil Kinnock

#20. Newspapers are tutors as well as informers.

Neil Kinnock

#21. In the U.K. the far Right is a stain on society and there is a cultural resistance to it.

Neil Kinnock

#22. Political renegades always start their career of treachery as 'the best men of all parties' and end up in the Tory knackery.

Neil Kinnock

#23. My first real experience of ambition was as party leader. It was my ambition for Labour to win, in which event I would be prime minister.

Neil Kinnock

#24. You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.

Neil Kinnock

#25. Margaret Thatcher was not a malicious person. She was a person who couldn't see, or didn't want to see, the unfairness and disadvantaging consequences of the application of what she thought to be a renewing ideology.

Neil Kinnock

#26. I am the first male member of my family for about three generations who can have reasonable confidence in expecting that I will leave this earth with more or less the same number of fingers, hands, legs, toes and eyes as I had when I was born.

Neil Kinnock

#27. If we are going to have a bicameral parliament, I think there should always be a reserved place for people whose background and experience are critical to the welfare of the nation.

Neil Kinnock

#28. I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.

Neil Kinnock

#29. I would die for my country but I could never let my country die for me.

Neil Kinnock

#30. No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.

Neil Kinnock

#31. American nuclear weapons would almost certainly start being removed from Britain within 12 months of a Labour government gaining power.

Neil Kinnock

#32. The trouble with the Socialist Workers Party is that they live in an historical thermos-flask.

Neil Kinnock

#33. The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.

Neil Kinnock

#34. Resentment is an extremely bitter diet, I have no desire to make my own toxins.

Neil Kinnock

#35. I'm the guy everybody wanted to live next door. They just didn't want me to be prime minister.

Neil Kinnock

#36. I didn't call for a ballot at the start of the miners' strike in 1984. I'll regret that until my dying day.

Neil Kinnock

#37. The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

Neil Kinnock

#38. The House of Lords must go - not be reformed, not be replaced, not be reborn in some nominated life-after-death patronage paradise, just closed down, abolished, finished.

Neil Kinnock

#39. Someone up there likes me.

Neil Kinnock

#40. Devolutionary reform will not provide a factory, a machine or jobs, build a school, train a doctor or put a pound on pensions.

Neil Kinnock

#41. Two negatives don't make a positive, any more than two half-wits make a wit.

Neil Kinnock

#42. Compassion is not a sloppy sentimental feeling for people who are underprivileged or sick ... it is an absolutely practical belief that regardless of a person's background, ability or ability to pay, he should be provided with the best that society has to offer.

Neil Kinnock

#43. I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old.

Neil Kinnock

#44. I'd like to be remembered as somebody who tried to promote justice.

Neil Kinnock

#45. I must emphasise that there is nothing in the Labour Party constituion that could, or should prevent people from holding opinions which favour Leninist-Trotskyism. Certainly Marxism has, and will continue to have an important function in the Labour Party.

Neil Kinnock

#46. That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion.

Neil Kinnock

#47. Harold Wilson is a petty bourgeois and will remain so in spirit even if they make him a Viscount.

Neil Kinnock

#48. We cannot remove the evils of capitalism without taking its source of power: ownership.

Neil Kinnock

#49. I want to retire at 50. I want to play cricket in the summer and geriatric football in the winter, and sing in the choir.

Neil Kinnock

#50. Those who have the immense dishonesty to fight with a ballot box in one hand and a rifle in the other have no place in democratic politics.

Neil Kinnock

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

Neil Kinnock

#52. I'm prepared to take advice on leisure from Prince Philip. He's a world expert on leisure. He's been practicing it for most of his adult life.

Neil Kinnock

#53. People, even independently minded people, do to an extent draw their impressions from what they are told, especially if they are told it incessantly by newspapers.

Neil Kinnock