Tony Benn Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern.

Tony Benn
I think the SDP really is a very right-wing party. In a funny way it's more right-wing than Mrs. Thatcher because Mrs. Thatcher is an old-fashioned liberal, if you know what I mean, she believes in market forces and small government. But my knowledge and experience of the SDP is that they believe in a centralised system, they believe in a federal Europe in which we would only be a province under Brussels, they believe in retaining the American bases, they want a statutory pay policy so they would govern the wages of everybody without proper negotiation. I think they're a very hard right party and I think the Labour Party which has now got a decent policy as a result of all the work we've done is going to pick up a lot of support this year.

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

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

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

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
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 am against] the Treaty of Rome which entrenches laissez faire as its philosophy and chooses bureaucracy as its administrative method.

Tony Benn
It is wholly wrong to blame Marx for what was done in his name, as it is to blame Jesus for what was done in his,

Tony Benn
In developing our industrial strategy for the period ahead, we have the benefit of much experience. Almost everything has been tried at least once.

Tony Benn
When we have a majority we will do it. I think the days of the Lords are quite genuinely numbered.

Tony Benn
If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.

Tony Benn
I think the truth is that the Labour Party isn't believed any more because people suspect it will say anything to get votes. The rebuilding of some radical alternatives to Thatcherism - and by that I mean all-party Thatcherism - will require us to do some very difficult things

Tony Benn
I sometimes wish the trade unionists who work in the mass media, those who are writers and broadcasters and secretaries and printers and lift operators of Thomson House would remember that they too are members of our working class movement and have a responsibility to see that what is said about us is true.

Tony Benn
What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you?
Questions habitually asked whenever he met with someone in power

Tony Benn
People in debt become hopeless and hopeless people don't vote. They always say that that everyone should vote but I think that if the poor in Britain or the United States turned out and voted for people that represented their interests there would be a real democratic revolution.

Tony Benn
I wouldn't like to go to a dentist who, just before he drilled my teeth, told me he was not a dentist himself but that his father had been a very good dentist.
On the hereditary House of Lords

Tony Benn
Of the influence of Parliament:
Through talk, we tamed kings, restrained tyrants, averted revolution.

Tony Benn
I did not enter the Labour Party forty-seven years ago to have our manifesto written by Dr Mori, Dr Gallup and Mr Harris.

Tony Benn
[The Labour Party]'s never been a socialist party, but it's always had socialists in it, just as there are some Christians in the Church, it's an exact parallel.

Tony Benn
Some of the jam we thought was for tomorrow, we've already eaten.

Tony Benn
People say that if we work for the Single European Act, women will get their rights, the water will be purer, and training will be better. That is rubbish. It is part of the attempt to consolidate the EEC.

Tony Benn