Aneurin Bevan quotes

" We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over. " # Indecision # Love # Age and Aging

" Economics, said Mr Stanley, is 50% psychology … What we need, apparently, is not statesman but hypnotists, not scientists, but witchdoctors, not confidence born of scientific prediction of the future, but confidence created by a political Confidence Trick. There is nothing surprising in this. It is the kind of mystic Mumbo-Jumbo to which capitalism is driven when austere reason pronounces sentence of death upon it. It is the primitive recoil from reality and the burdens of reality which lies at the root of Fascist psychology. " # Politicians and Politics

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

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

" Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus. " # Freedom # Riches # Business

" 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. " # Hospitals # Life and Living # Love

" It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically. " # Industry # Politicians and Politics # Age and Aging

" 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. " # Insults # Complaints and Complaining # Music

" 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. " # Mind # Imagination # Love

" He seems determined to make a trumpet sound like a tin whistle. " # Modesty # Love # Silence