Tony Benn Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you.

Tony Benn
A faith is something you die for; a doctrine is something you kill for: there is all the difference in the world.

Tony Benn
Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters.

Tony Benn
Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.

Tony Benn
If you file your waste-paper basket for 50 years, you have a public library.

Tony Benn
The present combination of corporate or commercial control theoretically answerable to politically appointed Boards of Governors is not in any sense a democratic enough procedure to control the power the broadcasters have.

Tony Benn
The 1973 Labour Conference will have before it the most radical programme the Party has prepared since 1945.

Tony Benn
People would do well to ask themselves how many of their ambitions and aspirations derive from the type of economic system they inhabit and the insecurity and exhaustion it creates, and question the sense and purpose of a society where control of a large portion of life is abdicated under contract in the labour market, and where immense creativity and potential is stifled by the need to do difficult and repetitive tasks in order to earn a wage.

Tony Benn
I don't want to commit myself in advocating a definite republican constitution which will get bogged down with the question of who would elect the President and when.

Tony Benn
Middle class Labour leaders are recaptured by the establishment when they die.

Tony Benn
Workers are not going to be fobbed off with a few shares... or by a carbon copy of the German system of co-determination.

Tony Benn
The general election of 1983 has produced one important result that has passed virtually without comment in the media. It is that, for the first time since 1945, a political party with an openly socialist policy has received the support of over eight and a half million people. This is a remarkable development by any standards and it deserves some analysis … the 1983 Labour manifesto commanded the loyalty of millions of voters and a democratic socialist bridge-head in public understanding and support can be made.

Tony Benn
I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralize them.

Tony Benn
The crisis that we inherit when we come to power will be the occasion for fundamental change and not the excuse for postponing it

Tony Benn
Through me the energy policy of the whole Common Market is being held up. Without opening old wounds, it pleases me no end.

Tony Benn
When you think of the number of men in the world who hate each other, why, when two men love each other, does the church split?

Tony Benn
Britain's continuing membership of the Community would mean the end of Britain as a completely self-governing nation and the end of our democratically elected Parliament as the supreme law making body in the United Kingdom.

Tony Benn
Choice depends on the freedom to choose and if you are shackled with debt you don't have the freedom to choose.

Tony Benn
Well I came across Marx rather late in life actually, and when I read him, two things: first of all I realised that he'd come to the conclusion about capitalism which I'd come to much later, and I was a bit angry he'd thought of it first; and secondly, I see Marx who was an old Jew, as the last of the Old Testament Prophets, this old bearded man working in the British Library, studying capitalism, that's what 'Das Kapital' was about, it was an explanation of British capitalism. And I thought to myself, 'Well anyone could write a book like that, but what infuses, what comes out of his writing, is the passionate hostility to the injustice of capitalism. He was a Prophet, and so I put him in that category as an Old Testament Prophet.

Tony Benn
He has a deep contempt for Britain, the British people and parliamentary democracy. He is trying to climb back to power via the Treaty of Rome, and put Britain under government from Brussels for ever. In 1970 Mr Heath solemnly promised that he would not take Britain into the Common Market without the full-hearted consent of the British people. He broke his pledged word then, and he now says he will not accept a 'No' vote on Thursday. Heath promised more jobs and higher living standards inside the EEC. These promises were all broken, and he now tells us we are so poor we cannot come out; beggars can't be choosers. That is false, too. Heath's leadership has been a total disaster for the British people. The Tory Party threw him out.

Tony Benn
The House will forgive me for quoting five democratic questions that I have developed during my life. If one meets a powerful person—Rupert Murdoch, perhaps, or Joe Stalin or Hitler—one can ask five questions: what power do you have; where did you get it; in whose interests do you exercise it; to whom are you accountable; and, how can we get rid of you? Anyone who cannot answer the last of those questions does not live in a democratic system.

Tony Benn
Britain today is suffering from galloping obsolescence.

Tony Benn
Britain is the only colony in the British Empire and it is up to us now to liberate ourselves.

Tony Benn
We want industry to be in the public sector, to change the power structure of our society... We have not yet carved out of public enterprise a wide enough area of management decision which ought properly to be brought within the ambit of the workers themselves.

Tony Benn
If democracy is destroyed in Britain it will be not the communists, Trotskyists or subversives but this House which threw it away. The rights that are entrusted to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield. I just could not do it. It would be theft of public rights.

Tony Benn
Had a long talk to the Chinese First Secretary at the embassy — a very charming man called Liao Dong — and said how much I admired Mao Tse tung or Zedong, the greatest man of the twentieth century. He said that I couldn't admire Mao more than he did. I asked him how Mao was viewed now. He said Mao was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong; the Cultural Revolution didn't work. He said he had been named after Mao — it was amusing.

Tony Benn
The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin's Russia: it's like blaming Jesus Christ for the Inquisition in Spain.

Tony Benn
[Edward Heath], who sold out Britain's interests to the Common Market and gave our sovereignty away without our consent—with support of Mr Thorpe and the Liberals—is not entitled to wave the Union Jack to get himself out of the mess.

Tony Benn
Mr Tony Benn welcomes compulsory homework for pensioners.

Tony Benn
Marxism is now a world faith and must be allowed to enter into a continuous dialogue with other world faiths, including religious faiths.

Tony Benn