Neil Kinnock Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The unforgivable political sin is vanity, the killer diet is sour grapes.

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.

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

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

Someone up there likes me.

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.

The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Newspapers are tutors as well as informers.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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