Michael Foot Quotes

We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.

Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power.

Is the Labour Party to remain a democratic party in which the right of free criticism and free debate is not merely tolerated but encouraged? Or are the rank and file of the party to be bludgeoned or cowed into an uncritical subservience towards the leadership?

Most liberties have been won by people who broke the law.

The only man I knew who could make a curse sound like a caress.

Politicians live in little worlds of their own and imagine these are the universe.

In my opinion, Marxism is a great creed of human liberation. It is the creed which says that when all other empires fade and vanish, our business is to enlarge the empire of the human mind.

He's passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever.

People must learn more and more that the strength of this country is the democratic power of the trade union movement.

All is fair in love and war and Parliamentary procedure.

Socialism without public ownership is nothing but a fantastic apology.

People can say what they want in the Labour Party.

Think of it! A second chamber selected by the Whips. A seraglio of eunuchs.

It does so happen to be the case that if the freedom of the people of this country - and especially the rights of trade unionists - if those precious things in the past had been left to the good sense and fairmindedness of judges, we would have precious few freedoms in this country.

How long will it be before the cry goes up: "Let's kill all the judges"?

No rising hope on the political scene who offered his services to Labour when I happened to be its leader can be dismissed as an opportunist.

Of course my father was a great influence on me. He taught me how to read.

I certainly think that a Labour Government will have to have effective powers to control the outflow of capital.

A Royal Commission is a broody hen sitting on a china egg.

I have never been in favour of expelling people from the Labour Party.

You can have a wages policy imposed by mass unemployment.

There are judges who stretch the law... to suit reactionary attitudes.

A Britain which denounced the insanity of the nuclear strategy would be in a position to direct its influence at the United Nations and in the world at large, in a manner at present denied us

Of all the sights and sounds which attracted me on my first arrival to live in London in the mid-thirties, one combined operation left a lingering, individual spell. I naturally went to Hyde Park to hear the orators, the best of the many free entertainments on offer in the capital. I heard the purest milk of the world flowing, then as now, from the platform of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

A speech from Ernest Bevin on a major occasion had all the horrific fascination of a public execution. If the mind was left immune, eyes and ears and emotions were riveted.

There is nothing wrong with being a Marxist. Their point of view is essential to a democratic debate.

I've been on the left of the Party since I joined it about 1934 and I haven't seen much reason for altering... I have always been a strong libertarian both inside the Labour Party and outside... what I want to seek to do over a period of course is to establish a Socialist society.

The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time under the bed looking for communists that they haven't had the time to look in the bed.

The national strike of the miners in 1972 performed, I believe, a great service, not only to the miners, but the people in Britain today who wanted coal.

Disraeli was my favourite Tory. He was an adventurer pure and simple, or impure and complex. I'm glad to say Gladstone got the better of him.