Neil Kinnock quotes:
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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.
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Arthur Scargill is the Labour movements nearest equivalent to a First World War General.
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American nuclear weapons would almost certainly start being removed from Britain within 12 months of a Labour government gaining power.
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Is Tony Blair of the Labour party? The answer to that is profoundly 'yes', but that is not how, sentimentally, he is regarded in the Labour movement generally.
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The trouble with the Socialist Workers Party is that they live in an historical thermos-flask.
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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.
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Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.
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No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.
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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.
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At various times in the next 20 or 30 years I think it reasonable to anticipate that I will be among the leadershp of the Labour Party, but as far as being leader, I can't see it happening, and I'm not particularly keen on it happening.
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The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.
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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.
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The unforgivable political sin is vanity; the killer diet is sour grapes.
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New!Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.
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Harold Wilson is a petty bourgeois and will remain so in spirit even if they make him a Viscount.
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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.
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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.
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Newspapers are tutors as well as informers.
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I am the first male member of my family for about three generations who can have reasonable confidence in expecting that I will leave this earth with more or less the same number of fingers, hands, legs, toes and eyes as I had when I was born.
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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.
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The enemy of idealism is zealotry.
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In the U.K. the far Right is a stain on society and there is a cultural resistance to it.
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I didn't call for a ballot at the start of the miners' strike in 1984. I'll regret that until my dying day.
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[Marx's theories] gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.
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I'm the guy everybody wanted to live next door. They just didn't want me to be prime minister.
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You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.
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Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry.
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People, even independently minded people, do to an extent draw their impressions from what they are told, especially if they are told it incessantly by newspapers.
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I want to retire at 50. I want to play cricket in the summer and geriatric football in the winter, and sing in the choir.
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Devolutionary reform will not provide a factory, a machine or jobs, build a school, train a doctor or put a pound on pensions.
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I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old.
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I would die for my country, but I could never let my country die for me.
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I?m not even sure I?d go into a reformed House of Lords. But let?s put it like this, the decision would have been easier had there been not even complete reform but a substantial stride.
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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.
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Mobile phones are the only subject on which men boast about who's got the smallest.
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Political renegades always start their career of treachery as 'the best men of all parties' and end up in the Tory knackery.
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Resentment is an extremely bitter diet, I have no desire to make my own toxins.
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Someone up there likes me.
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That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion.
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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.
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They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow.
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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.
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Two negatives don't make a positive, any more than two half-wits make a wit.
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We cannot remove the evils of capitalism without taking its source of power: ownership.
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We must not look for some kind of Messiah.
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Without false modetsy, I don't think I have a fraction of the talent of either Bevan of Foot.