Michael Foot: Trending quotes

Michael Foot trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection

Michael Foot: 108 quotes0 likes

“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”

newspaper article, 1960.
1960s

“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.”

Speech to the Union of Post Office Workers at Bournemouth (15 May 1977).
1970s

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

The Morning Star (1976).
1970s

“What is needed is a strong shift leftwards. This party in Parliament ought to start the process, and if it won't, the party conference will do it for them”

Tribune, 1979
1970s

“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”

Morning Star, 1980
1980s

“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.
Speech before the 1983 General Election.
1980s

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

Aneurin Bevan, Vol 1, 1962
1960s

“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”

House of Commons speech (1974)
1970s

“I think the House of Lords ought to be abolished and I don't think the best way for me to abolish it is to go there myself”

On his departure from the House of Commons, 1992.
1990s

“Socialism without public ownership is nothing but a fantastic apology.”

The Daily Herald, 1956.
1950s

“It's quite a change to have a prime minister who hasn't got any political ideas at all.”

On John Major, 1991
1990s

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

The Daily Telegraph, 1977
1970s

“He was without any rival whatever, the first comic genius who ever installed himself in Downing Street”

On Benjamin Disraeli, in his own book, Debts of Honour
1980s

“She has no imagination and that means no compassion”

On Margaret Thatcher, 1981
1980s

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

On David Steel, 1979
1970s

“The crisis afflicting this country, along with other countries of the Western world, is a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of the dominant economic system that prevails in all those countries.”

Speech to the House of Commons (Hansard, 20 January 1976, Col. 1126)
1970s

“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.”

Source: On BBC's Panorama (22 March 1976)

“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.”

Debts of Honour, 1980.
1980s

“When I was a small boy, following the affairs of the House of Commons as closely as I could, I asked my father what a Royal Commission was. He said, "It is a broody hen sitting on a china egg."”

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1964/dec/03/schedule-7-commencement-transitional in the House of Commons (3 December 1964) <br class="br">1960s

“It is not necessary that every time he rises he should give his famous imitation of a semi-house-trained polecat.”

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1978/mar/02/business-of-the-house in the House of Commons (2 March 1978), referring to Norman Tebbit <br class="br">1970s