Aneurin Bevan Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aneurin Bevan
It has been suggested, I think by the hon. Member for East Aberdeenshire (Mr. Boothby) that the most constructive suggestion he could make was to urge an early General Election and a return of a Tory Government in Britain. Why on earth should he want to prophesy what might result from a Tory Government when history has the record for him? Why read the crystal when he can read the book?

Aneurin Bevan
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.

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

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

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

Aneurin Bevan
If you carry this resolution you will send Britain's Foreign Secretary naked into the conference chamber.

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

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

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 language of priorities is the religion of socialism.

Aneurin Bevan
Advertising is "an evil service."

Aneurin Bevan
The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.

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
I am not going to spend any time whatsoever in attacking the Foreign Secretary…If we complain about the tune, there is no reason to attack the monkey when the organ grinder is present.
During a debate on the Suez crisis

Aneurin Bevan
There are two ways of getting into the Cabinet—you can crawl in or kick your way in.

Aneurin Bevan
Just consider, all the little nations running for shelter here and there, one running to Russia and another to the United States. In that situation before anything else would happen, the world will have been polarised between the Soviet Union and the United States. It is against that negative polarisation we have been fighting for years. We want to have the opportunity to interpose between these two giants a moderating, modifying and mitigating diplomacy.

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