Aneurin Bevan Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

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

Aneurin Bevan
The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.
Of Harold Macmillan

Aneurin Bevan
Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

Aneurin Bevan
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.

Aneurin Bevan
Although I am not myself a devotee of bigness for bigness sake, 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.

Aneurin Bevan
I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Aneurin Bevan
He is a man walking backwards with his face to the future.

Aneurin Bevan
You have got to purge the army at the top. It will have to be a drastic purge, because the spirit of the British Army has to be regained. We have in this country five or six generals, members of other nations, Czechs, Poles, and French, all of them trained in the use of German weapons and German technique... I know it is hurtful to our pride, but would it not be possible to put some of these men temporarily in charge of our men in the field?

Aneurin Bevan
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 future, but confidence created by a political Confidence Trick. There is nothing surprising in this. It is the kind of mystic Mumbo-Jumbo to which capitalism is driven when austere reason pronounces sentence of death upon it. It is the primitive recoil from reality and the burdens of reality which lies at the root of Fascist psychology.

Aneurin Bevan
Explaining how he persuaded doctors to accept the National Health Service:
I stuffed their mouths with gold.

Aneurin Bevan
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 that inflicted those experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

Aneurin Bevan
This so-called affluent society is an ugly society still. It is a vulgar society. It is a meretricious society. It is a society in which priorities have gone all wrong.

Aneurin Bevan
The spectacle therefore afforded us by the United States is one of technical brilliance and social blindness.

Aneurin Bevan
If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution.

Aneurin Bevan
Man must first live before he can live abundantly.

Aneurin Bevan
Of J.B. Priestley during the WW2:
Playing on a fuddled fiddle, somewhere in the muddled middle.

Aneurin Bevan
Listening to a speech by Chamberlain is like paying a visit to Woolworth's: everything in its place and nothing above sixpence.

Aneurin Bevan
I know that the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a kind of desiccated calculating machine.

Aneurin Bevan
Sir Anthony Eden has been pretending that he is now invading Egypt in order to strengthen the United Nations. Every burglar of course could say the same thing, he could argue that he was entering the house in order to train the police. So, if Sir Anthony Eden is sincere in what he is saying, and he may be, he may be, then if he is sincere in what he is saying then he is too stupid to be a prime minister.

Aneurin Bevan
The Labour Party should oppose the Government arms plan root and branch.

Aneurin Bevan
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.

Aneurin Bevan
Discontent arises from a knowledge of the possible, as contrasted with the actual.

Aneurin Bevan
No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

Aneurin Bevan
The Prime Minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights debates like a war and the war like a debate.

Aneurin Bevan
The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the Right Honorable Gentleman for four and a half years.

Aneurin Bevan
Now, the vicissitudes that afflict the individual have their source in society. It is this situation that has given currency to the phrase social forces. Personal relations have given way to impersonal ones. The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control. The study of how it is to be done is the function of politics.

Aneurin Bevan
Yesterday, Barbara [Castle] quoted from a speech which I made some years ago, and she said that I believed that Socialism in the context of modern society meant the conquest of the commanding heights of the economy …

Aneurin Bevan
The great Powers of the world today as they look at the armaments they have built up, find themselves hopelessly frustrated. If that be the case, what is the use of speaking about first-class, second-class and third-class Powers? That is surely the wrong language to use. It does not comply with contemporary reality. What we have to seek is new ways of being great, new modes of pioneering, new fashions of thought, new means of inspiring and igniting the minds of mankind. We can do so.

Aneurin Bevan
Apparently some fire-eaters today have been saying "Never again must we allow ourselves to get into the same condition of military unprepardness, so we are going to build up a vast war machine in this country in order to surround defeated Germany with a sea of peaceful tranquillity..." It looks as though the consequences of defeat will be more desirable than those of victory.

Aneurin Bevan
The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do. In 1945 it was Harold Laski, in 1951 it is me.

Aneurin Bevan