Aneurin Bevan

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

— Aneurin Bevan

Poor fellow, he suffers from files.

— Aneurin Bevan

The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the Right Honorable Gentleman for four and a half years.

— Aneurin Bevan

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

— Aneurin Bevan

Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

— Aneurin Bevan

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

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

— Aneurin Bevan

It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically.

— 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.

— Aneurin Bevan

He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind. He does not have to struggle... with the crowded pulsations of a fecund imagination. On the contrary he is almost devoid of imagination.

— Aneurin Bevan

He seems determined to make a trumpet sound like a tin whistle.

— Aneurin Bevan

I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.

— Aneurin Bevan

Politics is a blood sport.

— Aneurin Bevan

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

— Aneurin Bevan

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

— Aneurin Bevan

You're not an M.P., you're a gastronomic pimp.

— Aneurin Bevan

Reactionary: A man walking backwards with his face to the future.

— Aneurin Bevan

Now, the vicissitudes that afflict the individual have their source in society. It is this situation that has given currency to the phrase social forces. Personal relations have given way to impersonal ones. The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control. The study of how it is to be done is the function of politics.

— Aneurin Bevan