Quotes by Aneurin Bevan

• Politics is a blood sport.
• We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.
• This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.
• This is my truth, tell me yours.
• The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do.
• The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.
• The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.
• Stand not too near the rich man lest he destroy thee - and not too far away lest he forget thee.
• Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.
• Poor fellow, he suffers from files.
• I know that the right kind of political leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine.
• Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.
• Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.
• Reactionary: a man walking backwards with his face to the future.
• I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.
• I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
• I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one.
• It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically.
• It is not possible to create peace in the Middle East by jeopardizing the peace of the world.
• He seems determined to make a trumpet sound like a tin whistle.