Harold Wilson Quotes

He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.

assistance of France. In London, Eban fared better, receiving no such threat from Prime Minister Harold Wilson; but Wilson

Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you’re scared to death.

I've buried all the hatchets. But I know where I've buried them and I can dig them up again if necessary.

Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.

why do other ‘snobs’ – and indeed everyone who dreams of a big house and an exciting social life – not turn to serial murder, too?

there were so many men buying sexual services that the police could not keep track of the cars they were trying to record. In one night in Manchester, for example, four thousand cars were sighted and logged.

Boredom is often a useful instrument in politics. Never underestimate it.

John Scripps, who murdered three people in Singapore and Thailand,

Finally, they began to investigate the prime minister, Harold Wilson. Wilson, Wright was convinced, was a KGB agent.” I’m nodding along like a metronome at this point. “There was a group, a cabal if you like, of MI5 officers. About thirty of them. They actually planned a coup d’état in 1972. They

remedy. The issue of Europe, he suggested, should be taken out of the hands of governments and parties, and put directly to the people in a referendum. Such a vote would be constitutionally new, but then so was signing away power to a European body. It could be justified on the grounds that the issue affected the rights of every citizen. From Labour’s point of view, there was the advantage that it would make it possible for non-partisan front-benchers to avoid any outright personal commitment, or contradiction of earlier positions – without loss of face.

The conventions of coding or systems of metaphor that make us human are known as "culture" or "cultural configuration" in anthropology. The systems used in science at a given date are known as the models of that period, or sometimes all the models are lumped together into one super-model which is then called "the" paradigm. The general case — the class of all classes of metaphors — is called a group's emic reality (by Dr. Harold Garfinkle who has built a meta-system called ethnomethodology out of the sub-systems of anthropology and social psychology) or its existential reality (by the Existentialists) or its reality-tunnel (by Dr. Timothy Leary, psychologist, philosopher and designer of computer software).

Who would not like to be given a little more credit for one’s achievements, and a little less criticism for one’s failings?

But Rusk's style soon irritated him [Averell Harriman], and those who were around him detected a very subtle patronizing of the Secretary. (It showed at one staff meeting of high-level State officials: Rusk, Ball, Harriman, the Assistant Secretaries. Rusk addressed his team, saying that Harold Wilson was in town and that it looked as if he was going to win the election and become Prime Minister, and perhaps they had better do something for him. Did anyone know where he was staying? No one knew, so Rusk dispatched Ball to call the British embassy and find out. Ball left, came back white-faced a few minutes later, and whispered to Rusk, "He's Averell's house guest." Harriman, sitting there, never moved a muscle.)p197

Benjamin Croker. Don’t get many of your lot down here, you know.’ Whether he meant Prime Ministers, KGB agents or Labour Party members was unclear, but all three were equally true. Harold ploughed on.

James Bond’s latest outing, The Spy Who Loved Me, had featured an ill-advised and hastily-written fifth act ‘twist’ whereby the unnamed PM, played by a no-name Yorkshire character actor, had absconded and sought to take ‘State Secrets’ with him to the Russians. Roger Moore had chased him down–improbably, in a speedboat–and seen to it that he would face justice. The critics were calling for the same fate to befall the screenwriters.

Do you know why we have a constitution, Sir John? Don’t answer, I am asking a rhetorical question. We have a constitution, of sorts, so that we can stave off revolution by ensuring that the common man feels that he has a government that, even though he may not have voted for it, he can understand why it exists.

My problem in replying to you is that Velikovsky always tosses with a two-headed coin. If ordinary orientalists like myself simply leave him aside & get on with real work, he complains of their disdain (& the public are left unprotected). If, conversely, orientalists like myself (who happen to be burdened with several thousands more facts than Velikovsky even dreams of) actually dare to stand up & expose him, then of course he snidely implies that we are some sort of closed caucus with interests at stake. It’s always “heads you lose, tails I win”…. Would you, I reflectively wonder, publish a book that insisted on the identity of Harold Wilson and Harold of Hastings, of Napoleon, Bismarck & Charlemagne, and on the role of your firm as secret HQ of the IRA, all as absolutely genuine historical fact, with “proofs” (e.g., all aunts in France are large, because tante is the feminine for tant)? Because that is, comparatively, the level of historical fraud that V. represents.

All this is merely internal Labour Party politics of course. And Labour Party politics in opposition at that. The real power of the state, as opposed to the skirmishing line of the establishment which is the Labour right, will be deployed later. We have not yet even seen the forces that were deployed to stop Scotland voting Yes in the referendum. There has been no public statement by the banks and the bosses of the supermarkets, no speech by the Governor of the Bank of England, no moment when the politically neutral Queen ‘lets her views be known’~all of which happened during the referendum campaign. Nor, since a Corbyn led Labour Party is still a long way from government, has there been the kind of moment where the governor of the Bank of England tells a Labour prime minister to dump his economic policy, as Lord Cromer instructed Harold Wilson in the 1960s, or where the IMF imposes austerity, as it did on an all too willing Denis Healy in the late 1976s. Anyone who wants an analysis of how this will all work can still do no better than read two books by Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society. Or to read how the left wing rapture for former Nye Bevan supporter Harold Wilson turned to despair there is no better account than the one written by Paul Foot. For a contemporary example of the same disastrous process we need look no further than the defenestration of Tsipris’ Syriza in Greece. These are endgames, not the immediate prospect of the coming months. But they should warn us that we need to prepare alternatives now and not allow the excitement of current advance to blind us to the real dangers ahead. They should also serve to warn us that if we are to avoid these dangers it will be mass movements and political organisations outside the Labour Party which will play a decisive role.

I am an optimist, but I am an optimist who carries a raincoat.

On May 14, 1912—eight months after his stepmother’s awful death—Andrew Kehoe, then forty years old, took a wife. Her full name was Ellen Agnes Price—“Nellie” to everyone who knew her. Born in 1875, she came from a family of proud Irish Catholic immigrants, whose most prominent member was her uncle Lawrence. A Civil War hero who had fought at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, Lawrence had grown up in Michigan, returned to his home state after the war, and purchased a wilderness tract in Bath Township, which he eventually transformed into a flourishing 320-acre farm. In 1880, he turned his phenomenal energies to mercantile pursuits, successfully engaging in the grocery, lumber, dry goods, and hardware businesses before becoming a pioneer in the nascent automobile industry as founder and president of the Lansing Auto Body Company. In addition to his myriad enterprises, he served as Lansing’s chief of police and superintendent of public works, did a four-year term as a member of the city council, headed the Lansing Business Men’s Association, and ran as the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in 1916.1 Among his eight siblings was his younger brother, Patrick. Born in Ireland in 1848, Patrick had been brought to America as an infant and spent most of his life in Michigan. Financially beholden to his wealthy older brother, he worked as a farmhand on Lawrence’s spread in Bath before becoming an employee of the Auto Body Company. His marriage to the former Mary Ann Wilson had produced a son, William, and six daughters, among them his firstborn child, Nellie, the future Mrs. Andrew Kehoe.2

Alec personifies all those elderly people who are no longer seen as living human beings with hopes, fears and desires but simply as bodies, which makes it so much easier to ignore them when they disappear or die.