Michael Foot famous quotes

07-20-2025

Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power.
-- Michael Foot

#Reading #Men #He Man
We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.
-- Michael Foot

#Mean #Progress #Purpose
Think of it! A second chamber selected by the Whips. A seraglio of eunuchs.
-- Michael Foot

#Thinking
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

#Party #Criticism #Debate
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

#Eye #Mind #Ears
Of course my father was a great influence on me. He taught me how to read.
-- Michael Foot

#Father #Taught #Influence
How long will it be before the cry goes up: Let's kill all the judges?
-- Michael Foot

#Judging #Long #Cry
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

#Believe #People #Coal
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

#Simple #Favourite #Gladstone
There is nothing wrong with being a Marxist. Their point of view is essential to a democratic debate
-- Michael Foot

#Views #Essentials #Debate
Of all the sights and sounds which attracted me on my first arrival to live in London in the mid-thirties, one combined operation left a lingering, individual spell. I naturally went to Hyde Park to hear the orators, the best of the many free entertainments on offer in the capital. I heard the purest milk of the world flowing, then as now, from the platform of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.
-- Michael Foot

#Party #Sight #World
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

#Mind #Empires #Opinion
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

#Leader #Political #Rising
People must learn more and more that the strength of this country is the democratic power of the trade union movement
-- Michael Foot

#Country #People #Movement
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

#Country #Past #Rights
[There are] judges who stretch the law...to suit reactionary attitudes.
-- Michael Foot

#Attitude #Law #Judging
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

#Secret #Bed #Looks
He's passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever.
-- Michael Foot

#Political #Rising #Periods
I certainly think that a Labour Government will have to have effective powers to control the outflow of capital.
-- Michael Foot

#Thinking #Government #Labour
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

#Strong #Party #Want
Most liberties have been won by people who broke the law
-- Michael Foot

#Law #People #Liberty
A Royal Commission is a broody hen sitting on a china egg.
-- Michael Foot

#Eggs #Hens #Royal
Politicians live in little worlds of their own and imagine they are the universe.
-- Michael Foot

#Littles #World #Imagine
You can have a wages policy imposed by mass unemployment.
-- Michael Foot

#Unemployment #Wages #Economics
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

#Insanity #Nuclear #World
Socialism without public ownership is nothing but a fantastic apology
-- Michael Foot

#Apology #Socialism #Fantastic

You may also like:

Aneurin Bevan
Secretary of State for Health
Barbara Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn
British Politician
Clement Attlee
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Denis Healey
Chancellor of the Exchequer
Ed Miliband
British Politician
Edward Heath
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Enoch Powell
Former Financial Secretary to the Treasury
Geoffrey Howe
British Politician
Harold Wilson
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Hugh Gaitskell
British Politician
James Callaghan
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Michael Heseltine
British Politician
Neil Kinnock
Former Leader of the Labour Party
Roy Hattersley
British Politician
Roy Jenkins
British Politician
Shirley Williams
British Politician
Tony Benn
Former Member of the European Parliament
Tony Blair
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
William E. Gladstone
Former Chancellor of the Exchequer
Jeremy Corbyn
Politician