Aneurin Bevan Quotes

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over!

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.

The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it

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

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.

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.

The collective principle asserts that ... no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

There is only one hope for mankind - and that is democratic socialism. There is only one party in Great Britain which can do it - and that is the Labour Party.

Virtue is its own punishment.

That is why 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 that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now. Do not listen to the seductions of Lord Woolton. He is a very good salesman. If you are selling shoddy stuff you have to be a good salesman. But I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they are slightly worse than they were.

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.

He referred to Aneurin Bevan as 'Urinal' Bevan. As for the working classes, they couldn't write their own names in shit on a lavatory wall. I said I thought they could.

Churchill even paid Aneurin Bevan a backhanded compliment in the same debate when he gave him ‘an honourable mention for having, it appears by accident, perhaps not from the best of motives, happened to be right’.

The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the Right Honourable Gentleman for four and a half years. - MORE The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the Right Honourable Gentleman for four and a half years.

No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

Bevan saw the whole process of historical development as a moving stage. He spoke about technological advances, the development of instant communications, how leaders would cope with the social and political change that would bring. He scoffed at attempts to decide what the ‘end point’ of society might be; for him that was absurd and self-defeating. Society would evolve and continue to evolve.

I have enough faith in my fellow creatures in Great Britain to believe that when they have got over the delirium of the television, when they realize that their new homes that they have been put into are mortgaged to the hilt, when they realize that the moneylender has been elevated to the highest position in the land, when they realize that the refinements for which they should look are not there, that it is a vulgar society of which no decent person could be proud, when they realize all those things, when the years go by and they see the challenge of modern society not being met by the Tories who can consolidate their political powers only on the basis of national mediocrity, who are unable to exploit the resources of their scientists because they are prevented by the greed of their capitalism from doing so, when they realize that the flower of our youth goes abroad today because they are not being given opportunities of using their skill and their knowledge properly at home, when they realize that all the tides of history are flowing in our direction, that we are not beaten, that we represent the future: then, when we say it and mean it, then we shall lead our people to where they deserve to be led.

The great radical politician Aneurin Bevan once said to me, “Never use irony in politics. Whenever I have done so it has got me into trouble. A lot of your hearers always take you literally.” He added, “It makes no difference how heavy your irony is, and how obvious it is to you. It is not obvious to them.

No history, no biography, ever tells you everything. All history selects and arranges, not to falsify but to highlight what is significant. And when, in Greco-Roman biography, the death of the central figure is particularly important, it is given special treatment. Think of Socrates or Julius Caesar. The four gospels, then, are not merely “passion narratives with extended introductions,” as one of Bultmann’s predecessors had suggested. They are not merely reflections of the faith of the later church projected onto a screen that the earliest evangelists themselves knew to be fictional. They present themselves as biographies, biographies of Jesus. But they are biographies with a difference. One can imagine how this might work. Someone might write a biography of Abraham Lincoln that was at the same time designed to show the way in which the old America of the original revolution was passing away, never to return. Similarly, someone might write a biography of Winston Churchill that was at the same time designed to show the way in which the old British ruling class was having its final hurrah before the winds of change swept through the United Kingdom. You can read Michael Foot’s biography of the great Labor politician Aneurin Bevan not simply as a window through which to view the great man, but as the description of a key moment in a much larger story that Foot was anxious to tell, a moment when British society began to embrace a socialist vision that would (Foot hoped) bring new hope to millions of poor working people. A biography can be a biography and still be a vehicle for telling a much bigger story.

In one sense the House of Commons is the most unrepresentative of representative assemblies. It is an elaborate conspiracy to prevent the real clash of opinion which exists outside from finding an appropriate echo within its walls. It is a social shock absorber placed between privilege and the pressure of popular discontent. The new Member’s first experience of this is when he learns that passionate feelings must never find expression in forthright speech...The classic Parliamentary style of speech is understatement. It is a style unsuited to the representative of working people because it slurs and mutes the deep antagonisms which exist in society.

I slept on a sofa bed in Michael’s library. Each night before retiring, I would go through a shelf or pile of books (his only filing system) filled with letters and reviews and notes. Every night brought a new revelation. A few letters from Mary Welsh, Hemingway’s fourth wife, whom Michael had known in the war, were tucked into Hemingway books. In a debunking biography of Michael’s hero, Aneurin Bevan, founder of the National Heath Service, I read Michael’s comment on the flyleaf, which began “read with rising anger ...

The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.

It is clear to the modern student of modern politics that a mixed economy is what most people of the West would prefer. It is neither prudent nor does it accord with our conception of the future that all forms of private property should live under perpetual threat.