Michael Foot Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

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

Michael Foot
Most liberties have been won by people who broke the law

Michael Foot
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

Michael Foot
How long will it be before the cry goes up: "Let's kill all the judges"?

Michael Foot
She has no imagination and that means no compassion

Michael Foot
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.

Michael Foot
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.

Michael Foot
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.

Michael Foot
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

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

Michael Foot
Disraeli was my favourite Tory. He was an adventurer pure and simple, or impure and complex. I'm glad to say Gladstone got the better of him.

Michael Foot
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.

Michael Foot
Men of power have not time to read; yet men who do not read are unfit for power

Michael Foot
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

Michael Foot
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.

Michael Foot
The only man I knew who could make a curse sound like a caress.

Michael Foot
Socialism without public ownership is nothing but a fantastic apology

Michael Foot
A speech from Ernest Bevin on a major occasion had all the horrific fascination of a public execution. If the mind was left immune, eyes and ears and emotions were riveted.

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

Michael Foot
I certainly think that a Labour Government will have to have effective powers to control the outflow of capital.

Michael Foot
No rising hope on the political scene who offered his services to Labour when I happened to be its leader can be dismissed as an opportunist.

Michael Foot
On British Liberal Democrat politician David Steel:
He's passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever.

Michael Foot
It's impossible to write the history of freedom in this country without telling how trade unions have contributed to it.

Michael Foot
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

Michael Foot
The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time under the bed looking for communists that they haven't had the time to look in the bed.

Michael Foot
Since the matter has been raised, can I say, Mr Speaker, that the individual concerned is not an endorsed member– [jeering].. the individual concerned is not an endorsed member of the Labour Party, and so far as I am concerned never will be an endorsed member?

Michael Foot
Politicians live in little worlds of their own and imagine they are the universe.

Michael Foot
Think of it! A second chamber selected by the Whips. A seraglio of eunuchs.

Michael Foot
[There are] judges who stretch the law... to suit reactionary attitudes.

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

Michael Foot