Denis Healey Quotes

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.

If you’re in a hole, stop digging.

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

War inside countries is all too common.

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.

Mrs Thatcher tells us she has given the French President a piece of her mind… not a gift I would receive with alacrity.

Socialism to me is establishing social control of power in society, and where that differs from liberalism for example which aims at a similar situation in some respects, is we think you can only establish control over power by changing the structure and distribution of power, notably economic power.

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.

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.

I’ve got a happy marriage, which is the most important singular thing.

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

When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

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

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.

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.