1.
The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.
Neil Kinnock
2.
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.
Neil Kinnock
3.
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.
Neil Kinnock
4.
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.
Neil Kinnock
5.
I would die for my country, but I could never let my country die for me.
Neil Kinnock
6.
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.
Neil Kinnock
7.
We cannot remove the evils of capitalism without taking its source of power: ownership.
Neil Kinnock
8.
Arthur Scargill is the Labour movements nearest equivalent to a First World War General.
Neil Kinnock
9.
The unforgivable political sin is vanity, the killer diet is sour grapes.
Neil Kinnock
10.
The enemy of idealism is zealotry.
Neil Kinnock
11.
They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow.
Neil Kinnock
12.
Resentment is an extremely bitter diet, I have no desire to make my own toxins.
Neil Kinnock
13.
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.
Neil Kinnock
14.
Someone up there likes me.
Neil Kinnock
15.
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.
Neil Kinnock
16.
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.
Neil Kinnock
17.
New!Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.
Neil Kinnock
18.
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.
Neil Kinnock
19.
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.
Neil Kinnock
20.
Political renegades always start their career of treachery as 'the best men of all parties' and end up in the Tory knackery.
Neil Kinnock
21.
No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.
Neil Kinnock
22.
You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.
Neil Kinnock
23.
Two negatives don't make a positive, any more than two half-wits make a wit.
Neil Kinnock
24.
The trouble with the Socialist Workers Party is that they live in an historical thermos-flask.
Neil Kinnock
25.
[Marx's theories] gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.
Neil Kinnock
26.
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.
Neil Kinnock
27.
Harold Wilson is a petty bourgeois and will remain so in spirit even if they make him a Viscount.
Neil Kinnock
28.
I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old.
Neil Kinnock
29.
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.
Neil Kinnock
30.
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.
Neil Kinnock
31.
Devolutionary reform will not provide a factory, a machine or jobs, build a school, train a doctor or put a pound on pensions.
Neil Kinnock
32.
American nuclear weapons would almost certainly start being removed from Britain within 12 months of a Labour government gaining power.
Neil Kinnock
33.
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.
Neil Kinnock
34.
Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry.
Neil Kinnock
35.
In the U.K. the far Right is a stain on society and there is a cultural resistance to it.
Neil Kinnock
36.
Mobile phones are the only subject on which men boast about who's got the smallest.
Neil Kinnock
37.
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.
Neil Kinnock
38.
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.
Neil Kinnock
39.
Without false modetsy, I don't think I have a fraction of the talent of either Bevan of Foot.
Neil Kinnock
40.
We must not look for some kind of Messiah.
Neil Kinnock
