Aneurin Bevan Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“You don't have to gaze into a crystal ball when you can read an open book.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“Damn it all you can't have the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“In Germany democracy died by the headman's axe. In Britain it can be by pernicious anaemia.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“You call that statesmanship. I call it an emotional spasm.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“He [Winston Churchill] is a man suffering from petrified adolescence.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“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 -
“He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind. He does not have to struggle... with the crowded pulsations of a fecund imagination. On the contrary he is almost devoid of imagination.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“There can be no immaculate conception of socialism.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“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 -
“I welcome this opportunity of pricking the bloated bladder of lies with the poniard of truth”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“Trade unions are islands of anarchy in a sea of chaos.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“Now, the vicissitudes that afflict the individual have their source in society. It is this situation that has given currency to the phrase social forces. Personal relations have given way to impersonal ones. The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control. The study of how it is to be done is the function of politics.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“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 -
“Reactionary: a man walking backwards with his face to the future.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“Stand not too near the rich man lest he destroy thee - and not too far away lest he forget thee.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.”
-- Aneurin Bevan -
“He seems determined to make a trumpet sound like a tin whistle.”
-- Aneurin Bevan