Quotes by Aneurin Bevan

“The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it”

“No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.”

“Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets”

“We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land”

“The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.”

“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.”

“Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.”

“Reactionary: a man walking backwards with his face to the future.”

“There is only one hope for mankind - and that is democratic socialism. There is only one party in Great Britain which can do it - and that is the Labour Party.”

“We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.”

“Politics is a blood sport.”

“I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interests.”

“We have a right to say that, if it means slightly dearer coal, it is better to have slightly dearer coal than cheaper colliers. Hon. Gentlemen here must face the issue that when they vote against t...”

“Any impartial examination of the British courts will show that even now, when the capitalist class of Great Britain can afford the luxury of apparent impartiality, there is evidence of bias in the ...”

“The Labour Party should oppose the Government arms plan root and branch.”

“If the immediate international situation is used as an excuse to get us to drop our opposition to the rearmament programme of the Government, the next phase must be that we must desist from any ind...”

“Economics, said Mr Stanley, is 50% psychology … What we need, apparently, is not statesman but hypnotists, not scientists, but witchdoctors, not confidence born of scientific prediction of the futu...”

“The fear of Hitler is to be used to frighten the workers of Britain into silence. In short Hitler is to rule Britain by proxy. If we accept the contention that the common enemy is Hitler and not th...”

“What argument have they to persuade the young men to fight except merely in another squalid attempt to defend themselves against a redistribution of the international swag?”

“[T]he country is now more concerned with the Prime Minister winning the war than with his winning a Debate in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister wins Debate after Debate and loses battle afte...”