Ken Livingstone quotes:

I actually think the civil service, who are the malignancy at the heart of public life, have consciously prevented, talked ministers out of, made it difficult regulatory-wise, to allow more pressure on alternative energy sources to grow.

All the politics of the post-war period was about the clash between the Soviet Union and America, and virtually all issues ended up being subordinated to that. Now, the question is, what is the most a socialist can achieve in a global economy?

I can easily lose myself emotionally in absolute Hollywood garbage.

I became a councillor back in 1971, so if by this stage in politics I'm making lots of big mistakes, then I shouldn't be here.

The press keep asking me, 'What was your biggest mistake?' But if I had made a big mistake, they'd all be writing about it, wouldn't they?

Short of being prime minister there isn't a better job in British politics than running London.

I think I have gone through my entire public career never telling a lie. I have made mistakes but I never knowingly lied.

I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself - the working-class tradition of self-education.

Working with the Jewish community is essential to me and what I stand for.

I have only ever borrowed money for investment. I have been sound money all my life.

I'm more interested in politicians who deal with human rights in their own country rather than lecture the rest of the world.

Everyone changes all the time.

My administration will tackle these issues in consultation with the black communities of London.

There needs to be radical development in equality law to create the environment to allow women to stay in work.

I would like to sound like James Mason. I reckon if I'd had a better voice I could have been prime minister. It is the most irritating voice in public life.

I undertake that, in the exercise of my functions of that office I will have regard to any guidance with respect to ethical standards issued by the secretary of state under Section 66 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999.

The whole culture of my background was deeply Conservative.

I was a weedy kid, not like one of those working-class men who can accommodate not being academically clever by physical strength and prowess.

Give me the whole world to run and then I'll be happy. If tomorrow I was told I had to sort out the whole world's problems I'd sleep like a baby.

I have no interest in managing my financial affairs.

I've got people handling the media. I employ at the moment two people. No-one is paying income tax on the money they use to employ people.

I am a socialist, a believer in rational thought and the rule of law.

I do explicitly see Jewish people as a people - not either a religion or an ethnicity but a people.

I've always been a workaholic. I reckon, on average, I've had less than one day a year off in my working career.

I'm an emotional person; I do occasionally shed a tear.

I mean I get loads of money, all from different sources. You give it to your accountant. They manage it. But you pay corporation tax. If you're then taking it out and spending it on yourself, you have to pay more.

I came into politics because I wished to change things. You can't do that by lying to people; you have to educate, and persuade, and carry them with you - and it's often a long haul.

I refuse not to have a sense of humour.

The market is a brilliant system for the exchange of goods and services, but it doesn't protect the environment unless it's regulated, it doesn't train your workforce unless it's regulated, and it doesn't give you the long-term investment you want.

When I was leader of the GLC, by the time I had been in control for three years, the difference in pay between the cleaner and the director general was a four-to-one ratio. I find that attractive.

I would like all newspapers to become workers' co-operatives.

I don't work hard enough. If I had worked harder I might have been prime minister.

Anybody who enjoys being in the House of Commons probably needs psychiatric help.

Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office. Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres.

There is now a desperate need for a London-wide left caucus of those interested in the GLC and local councils so that we can compare and discuss what is happening in each borough.

One thing that Chairman Mao did was to end the appalling foot binding of women. That alone justifies the Mao Tse-tung era.

It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the [congestion] charge that everybody else is paying and not actually try and skive out of it like some chiselling little crook.

Well, on lots of small things we could have done better, but on all the big things we called it right. You should make less mistakes as you get older, and I became a councillor back in 1971, so if by this stage in politics I'm making lots of big mistakes, then I shouldn't be here.

I think George Bush is the most corrupt American president since Harding in the Twenties. He is not the legitimate president. This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown.

I Kenneth Robert Livingstone, having been elected to the office of mayor of London, declare that I take that office upon myself, and will duly and faithfully fulfil the duties of it to the best of my judgement and ability.

The problem is that many MPs never see the London that exists beyond the wine bars and brothels of Westminster.

We look to the left and to the right And we need help but nobody's in sight Where is the man that we all need Tell him he's to come and rescue me.

Just because I am critical of the coalition doesn't mean I am anti-English. I am just anti-scumbags.

I think democracy's undermined when those who own newspapers fill them with trivia rather than real issues.

When I'm sifting the compost seed or pruning, I argue over issues in my head; I talk to myself.

The truth is, no one pays more tax than they have to.

My political beliefs are my moral, quasi-religious framework.

When you get into politics, you find that all your worst nightmares about it turn out to be true, and the people who are attracted to large concentrations of power are precisely the ones who should be kept as far away from it as possible.

If I was courting the Muslim vote, I wouldn't have put establishing the partnership ceremony at the forefront of my first term, would I? I go all around London advocating lesbian and gay rights.

I employed my wife for three years to sit in the attic and type up my autobiography, 700 pages, organise everywhere I go. I'm paying the normal rate of tax on the money I take out for myself.

The civil service are risk averse.

I've always told the truth. I've often been wrong - but I've never knowingly lied. Not in public life. Because I don't see the need to.

I've never declined to do an interview.

I'm never going to take the view that I should say whatever I need to say in order to achieve something. Because that implies a level of dishonesty.

I never came into life with any favours or privileges.

The people I really most admire are Robert Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. If you know someone, it is very hard to revere them.

Polling in a general election is pretty accurate, because turnout is usually high.

I could not cherish London and not value Jewish London. The contribution of Jews to London is immense - politically, economically, culturally, intellectually, philanthropically, artistically.

The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations.

I have met the people who run the world, and I am not in awe of them.

World wide capitalism kills more people everyday then Hitler did. And he was crazy.

I go all around London advocating lesbian and gay rights.

This life is messy.

Well, I get on with people who believe in something.

[Pigeons are] rats with wings.

Boris [ Johnson]and Dave [Cameron] gnawed each other's testicles [during the Tory civil war which blighted the EU referendum].

Consultation is a good thing when people agree with you, and a waste of time when people don't agree with you

Ed Miliband doesn't give a damn about what he looks like, how he dresses. He came into politics to change society.

Every budget I have ever prepared has been balanced.

Every year the international finance system kills more people than the Second World War. But at least Hitler was mad, you know.

Everyone is bisexual. Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything.

Global warming could be solved by shifting three to four per cent of global GDP to pay for it.

I am not against Israel, I am against Zionists.

I can only admire people who I have never met and are dead - because you know so much about anyone who is alive.

I don't just denounce suicide bombers. I denounce those governments which use indiscriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy.

I fear that within 10 years gays, trade union activists and left wing politicians will be led off to the gas chambers.

I feel a degree of regret that Marshall did not push on and say 'abolish the GLC' because I think it would have been a major saving and would have released massive resources for productive use.

I feel like Galileo going before the Inquisition to explain that the Sun doesn't revolve around the Earth. I hope I have more success.

I grew up in a house with very few books.

I grew up in Lambeth, I went to normal schools and I've grown up in a city where people say what they think.

I have opened newspapers and read incredible lies.

I just long for the day when I wake up and find that the Saudi royal family are swinging from lamp-posts.

I liked it when we had ugly politicians who droned on about issues.

I loathe and detest all this trivialisation of politics.

I swim three times a week.

I think it's much more important to keep people in work than have pay rises.

I'd love to write about my growing sexual awareness, but the press would turn it into something squalid.

If I blew my nose the Daily Express and the Daily Mail would say that I am trying to spread germ warfare.

If transport, housing and Olympic projects do not work, I will crawl away under a stone.

If Voting Changed Anything They'd Abolish It

If women had never been given the right to vote, then Labour would have won every election after the war.

If you are running a city you must focus on day-to-day problems.

I'm in exactly the same position as everybody else who has a small business.

It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself, we want a statue to look like the person.

I've met serial killers and professional assassins and nobody scared me as much as MrsT.

Most kids dont get to go their parents wedding.

My view is rather than just rage at your impotence you find the best way of achieving as much as you can within whatever constraints there are. It's not the world I would have created but you do what you can within it.

Only some ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster.

Politics is not a game. Thousands of people's jobs and services depended on what the GLC did, and they expected us to do the best we could.

Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz.

The American agenda is sweeping everything before it, and although it's not perfect, the EU is better on environmental issues. It's a less rapacious form of capitalism.

The British judiciary is one of the most corrupt in the world because of politically active judges.

The idea that the GLC should be abolished at a stroke is ill though out, undemocratic and will cost the people of London dear.

The Tories had the legal right to demand extra meetings of the council but I could decide when they would be held and always called them for Friday afternoons, knowing that three or four of the richer Tories went to the country early and were not prepared to stay in the city beyond lunchtime. I realised that nothing in politics is new when I read in Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars that Julius Caesar pulled the same trick when reactionaries in the senate were making his life difficult.

To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews.

To tackle climate change you don't have to reduce your quality of life, but you do have to change the way you live

What defines someone's music taste is their teens and early 20s. It's that combination of your sexual awakening and the music of the time, it fixes you forever.

What do we do about climate change bearing down upon us?

When you see someone trying to manoeuvre it round the school gates you have to think, you are a complete idiot.

Yes, there are lots of individual exceptions. But no one has ever done a study about voting intention without ascertaining that the biggest determining factor is your income and your wealth.

You cannot just have a socialist revolution in Norwood and nowhere else.

You can't expect to work for the Daily Mail group and have the rest of society treat with you respect as a useful member of society, because you are not.

You lose power in Britain and you are just Joe Public again.

I take a much more pragmatic view than many people on the Left about working with Neil Kinnock. Kinnock represents the best vehicle possible for achieving socialism now.