Aneurin Bevan Quotes
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Trade unions are islands of anarchy in a sea of chaos.
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Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.
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It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically.
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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.
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This is my truth, tell me yours.
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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.
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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.
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We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.
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Listening to a speech by [Neville] Chamberlain is like paying a visit to Woolworth's, everything in its place and nothing above sixpence.
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A Society in which the people's wants do not exceed their possessions is not a Socialist society.
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I know that the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation. If he sees suffering, privation or injustice he must not allow it to move him, for that would be evidence of the lack of proper education or of absence of self-control. He must speak in calm and objective accents and talk about a dying child in the same way as he would about the pieces inside an internal combustion engine.
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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.
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Damn it all you can't have the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver.
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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.
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We should not be pushing out figured when the facts are in the opposite direction.
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The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.
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The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the right hon. Gentleman for four and a half years.
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There are two ways of getting into the Cabinet - you can crawl in or kick your way in.
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There can be no immaculate conception of socialism.
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If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution.
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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.
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There is only one hope for mankind - and that is democratic Socialism.
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He [Winston Churchill] is a man suffering from petrified adolescence.
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Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.
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I know that the right kind of political leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine.
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I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.
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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.
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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.
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He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind.
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Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.
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Aneurin Bevan
- Born: November 15, 1897
- Died: July 6, 1960
- Occupation: Secretary of State for Health
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