Neil Kinnock Quotations

I didn't call for a ballot at the start of the miners' strike in 1984. I'll regret that until my dying day.

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.

Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.

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.

You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.

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.

The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.

No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.

The unforgivable political sin is vanity; the killer diet is sour grapes.

I'm the guy everybody wanted to live next door. They just didn't want me to be prime minister.

People, even independently minded people, do to an extent draw their impressions from what they are told, especially if they are told it incessantly by newspapers.

Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry.

I would die for my country, but I could never let my country die for me.

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.

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.

I'd like to be remembered as somebody who tried to promote justice.

My first real experience of ambition was as party leader. It was my ambition for Labour to win, in which event I would be prime minister.

If we are going to have a bicameral parliament, I think there should always be a reserved place for people whose background and experience are critical to the welfare of the nation.

There are politicians who seethe with ambition all the time, and there are a lot of other politicians who don't. I'm in the second category, that's all.

Mr Blair made the decision before the election that it would be his last as leader,

I've been so bloody respectable and responsible... I'm going to be a bloody old nuisance.

In the U.K. the far Right is a stain on society and there is a cultural resistance to it.

He addressed a grown-up party in a grown-up way. It's not going to repair anyone's gastric ulcer, but at least they know where he stands.

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.

Without false modetsy, I don't think I have a fraction of the talent of either Bevan of Foot.

Harold Wilson is a petty bourgeois and will remain so in spirit even if they make him a Viscount.

The trouble with the Socialist Workers Party is that they live in an historical thermos-flask.

We must not look for some kind of Messiah.

In the U.K. the far Right is a stain on society and there is a cultural resistance to it.

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.

I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old.

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.

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.

Mobile phones are the only subject on which men boast about who's got the smallest.

American nuclear weapons would almost certainly start being removed from Britain within 12 months of a Labour government gaining power.

Devolutionary reform will not provide a factory, a machine or jobs, build a school, train a doctor or put a pound on pensions.

Two negatives don't make a positive, any more than two half-wits make a wit.

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.

[Marx's theories] gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.

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.

They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow.

Arthur Scargill is the Labour movements nearest equivalent to a First World War General.

Resentment is an extremely bitter diet, I have no desire to make my own toxins.

Political renegades always start their career of treachery as 'the best men of all parties' and end up in the Tory knackery.

The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

New!Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.

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.

Someone up there likes me.

We cannot remove the evils of capitalism without taking its source of power: ownership.

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.

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.

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.

The future is plain and very bleak, ... Without change there will no rail transport in much of the Union by 2012.