Michael Foot Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

Is the Labour Party to remain a democratic party in which the right of free criticism and free debate is not merely tolerated but encouraged? Or are the rank and file of the party to be bludgeoned or cowed into an uncritical subservience towards the leadership?

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

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

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
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
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
A Royal Commission is a broody hen sitting on a china egg

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

Michael Foot
We had not the armour, the strength, the quickness in manoeuvre, yes, the leadership

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

Michael Foot
She has no imagination and that means no compassion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Foot