Ken Livingstone Quotes & Sayings

It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the [congestion] charge that everybody else is paying and not actually try and skive out of it like some chiselling little crook. — Ken Livingstone

Politics is not a healthy lifestyle. — Ken Livingstone

I actually think the civil service, who are the malignancy at the heart of public life, have consciously prevented, talked ministers out of, made it difficult regulatory-wise, to allow more pressure on alternative energy sources to grow. — Ken Livingstone

I've got people handling the media. I employ at the moment two people. No-one is paying income tax on the money they use to employ people. — Ken Livingstone

I have opened newspapers and read incredible lies. — Ken Livingstone

When I'm sifting the compost seed or pruning, I argue over issues in my head; I talk to myself. — Ken Livingstone

I do the gardening. — Ken Livingstone

The press keep asking me, 'What was your biggest mistake?' But if I had made a big mistake, they'd all be writing about it, wouldn't they? — Ken Livingstone

Global warming could be solved by shifting three to four per cent of global GDP to pay for it. — Ken Livingstone

You lose power in Britain and you are just Joe Public again. — Ken Livingstone

The American agenda is sweeping everything before it, and although it's not perfect, the EU is better on environmental issues. It's a less rapacious form of capitalism. — Ken Livingstone

I am a socialist, a believer in rational thought and the rule of law. — Ken Livingstone

I've always been a workaholic. I reckon, on average, I've had less than one day a year off in my working career. — Ken Livingstone

Working with the Jewish community is essential to me and what I stand for. — Ken Livingstone

If women had never been given the right to vote, then Labour would have won every election after the war. — Ken Livingstone

I would like all newspapers to become workers' co-operatives. — Ken Livingstone

I just long for the day when I wake up and find that the Saudi royal family are swinging from lamp-posts. — Ken Livingstone

If I blew my nose the Daily Express and the Daily Mail would say that I am trying to spread germ warfare. — Ken Livingstone

Everyone is bisexual. Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything. — Ken Livingstone

If you are running a city you must focus on day-to-day problems. — Ken Livingstone

Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz. — Ken Livingstone

I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself - the working-class tradition of self-education. — Ken Livingstone

Give me the whole world to run and then I'll be happy. If tomorrow I was told I had to sort out the whole world's problems I'd sleep like a baby. — Ken Livingstone

My main income is from speaking. — Ken Livingstone

There isn't much about my life that's been particularly conventional. — Ken Livingstone

The whole culture of my background was deeply Conservative. — Ken Livingstone

I have met the people who run the world, and I am not in awe of them. — Ken Livingstone

I don't work hard enough. If I had worked harder I might have been prime minister. — Ken Livingstone

I'm more interested in politicians who deal with human rights in their own country rather than lecture the rest of the world. — Ken Livingstone

I undertake that, in the exercise of my functions of that office I will have regard to any guidance with respect to ethical standards issued by the secretary of state under Section 66 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999. — Ken Livingstone

My view is rather than just rage at your impotence you find the best way of achieving as much as you can within whatever constraints there are. It's not the world I would have created but you do what you can within it. — Ken Livingstone

Politics is not a game. Thousands of people's jobs and services depended on what the GLC did, and they expected us to do the best we could. — Ken Livingstone

Psephology isn't a hate crime. — Ken Livingstone

The British judiciary is one of the most corrupt in the world because of politically active judges. — Ken Livingstone

The problem is that many MPs never see the London that exists beyond the wine bars and brothels of Westminster. — Ken Livingstone

Every budget I have ever prepared has been balanced. — Ken Livingstone

I have no interest in managing my financial affairs. — Ken Livingstone

I am not against Israel, I am against Zionists. — Ken Livingstone

I've always told the truth. I've often been wrong - but I've never knowingly lied. Not in public life. Because I don't see the need to. — Ken Livingstone

World wide capitalism kills more people everyday then Hitler did. And he was crazy. — Ken Livingstone

Thatcher was prepared to destroy the world rather than give in on something she believed in. — Ken Livingstone

I was a weedy kid, not like one of those working-class men who can accommodate not being academically clever by physical strength and prowess. — Ken Livingstone

I feel like Galileo going before the Inquisition to explain that the Sun doesn't revolve around the Earth. I hope I have more success. — Ken Livingstone

What defines someone's music taste is their teens and early 20s. It's that combination of your sexual awakening and the music of the time, it fixes you forever. — Ken Livingstone

There needs to be radical development in equality law to create the environment to allow women to stay in work. — Ken Livingstone

I swim three times a week. — Ken Livingstone

I can only admire people who I have never met and are dead - because you know so much about anyone who is alive. — Ken Livingstone

My only regret is the media's obsession with the past. — Ken Livingstone

If I was courting the Muslim vote, I wouldn't have put establishing the partnership ceremony at the forefront of my first term, would I? I go all around London advocating lesbian and gay rights. — Ken Livingstone

Boris [ Johnson]and Dave [Cameron] gnawed each other's testicles [during the Tory civil war which blighted the EU referendum]. — Ken Livingstone

The idea that the GLC should be abolished at a stroke is ill though out, undemocratic and will cost the people of London dear. — Ken Livingstone

Well, I mean, I'm very much a pragmatic person. — Ken Livingstone

I would like to sound like James Mason. I reckon if I'd had a better voice I could have been prime minister. It is the most irritating voice in public life. — Ken Livingstone

Consultation is a good thing when people agree with you, and a waste of time when people don't agree with you — Ken Livingstone

Jewish voters are not one homogenous block. — Ken Livingstone

I'm never going to take the view that I should say whatever I need to say in order to achieve something. Because that implies a level of dishonesty. — Ken Livingstone

This life is messy. — Ken Livingstone

Anybody who enjoys being in the House of Commons probably needs psychiatric help. — Ken Livingstone

I employed my wife for three years to sit in the attic and type up my autobiography, 700 pages, organise everywhere I go. I'm paying the normal rate of tax on the money I take out for myself. — Ken Livingstone

The civil service are risk averse. — Ken Livingstone

Everyone changes all the time. — Ken Livingstone

Short of being prime minister there isn't a better job in British politics than running London. — Ken Livingstone

What do we do about climate change bearing down upon us? — Ken Livingstone

I think I have gone through my entire public career never telling a lie. I have made mistakes but I never knowingly lied. — Ken Livingstone

I've never declined to do an interview. — Ken Livingstone

I have only ever borrowed money for investment. I have been sound money all my life. — Ken Livingstone

The market is a brilliant system for the exchange of goods and services, but it doesn't protect the environment unless it's regulated, it doesn't train your workforce unless it's regulated, and it doesn't give you the long-term investment you want. — Ken Livingstone

I've met serial killers and professional assassins and nobody scared me as much as MrsT. — Ken Livingstone

I think George Bush is the most corrupt American president since Harding in the Twenties. He is not the legitimate president. This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown. — Ken Livingstone

[Pigeons are] rats with wings. — Ken Livingstone

I feel a degree of regret that Marshall did not push on and say 'abolish the GLC' because I think it would have been a major saving and would have released massive resources for productive use. — Ken Livingstone

You cannot just have a socialist revolution in Norwood and nowhere else. — Ken Livingstone

I mean I get loads of money, all from different sources. You give it to your accountant. They manage it. But you pay corporation tax. If you're then taking it out and spending it on yourself, you have to pay more. — Ken Livingstone

Most politicians aren't allowed to express themselves any more. — Ken Livingstone

I take a much more pragmatic view than many people on the Left about working with Neil Kinnock. Kinnock represents the best vehicle possible for achieving socialism now. — Ken Livingstone

All the politics of the post-war period was about the clash between the Soviet Union and America, and virtually all issues ended up being subordinated to that. Now, the question is, what is the most a socialist can achieve in a global economy? — Ken Livingstone

Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office. Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres. — Ken Livingstone

My political beliefs are my moral, quasi-religious framework. — Ken Livingstone

I'm in exactly the same position as everybody else who has a small business. — Ken Livingstone

I liked it when we had ugly politicians who droned on about issues. — Ken Livingstone

The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations. — Ken Livingstone

I'd love to write about my growing sexual awareness, but the press would turn it into something squalid. — Ken Livingstone

I think democracy's undermined when those who own newspapers fill them with trivia rather than real issues. — Ken Livingstone

I loathe and detest all this trivialisation of politics. — Ken Livingstone

I came into politics because I wished to change things. You can't do that by lying to people; you have to educate, and persuade, and carry them with you - and it's often a long haul. — Ken Livingstone

To tackle climate change you don't have to reduce your quality of life, but you do have to change the way you live — Ken Livingstone

I think it's much more important to keep people in work than have pay rises. — Ken Livingstone

The best way to demonstrate the values of a western democracy is you put Osama bin Laden on trial; you challenge what he says. — Ken Livingstone

Just because I am critical of the coalition doesn't mean I am anti-English. I am just anti-scumbags. — Ken Livingstone

Polling in a general election is pretty accurate, because turnout is usually high. — Ken Livingstone

I do explicitly see Jewish people as a people - not either a religion or an ethnicity but a people. — Ken Livingstone

The people I really most admire are Robert Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. If you know someone, it is very hard to revere them. — Ken Livingstone

It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself, we want a statue to look like the person. — Ken Livingstone

The Tories had the legal right to demand extra meetings of the council but I could decide when they would be held and always called them for Friday afternoons, knowing that three or four of the richer Tories went to the country early and were not prepared to stay in the city beyond lunchtime. I realised that nothing in politics is new when I read in Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars that Julius Caesar pulled the same trick when reactionaries in the senate were making his life difficult. — Ken Livingstone

Most people wouldn't want to marry a politician. — Ken Livingstone

I fear that within 10 years gays, trade union activists and left wing politicians will be led off to the gas chambers. — Ken Livingstone

I never came into life with any favours or privileges. — Ken Livingstone

The truth is, no one pays more tax than they have to. — Ken Livingstone

Yes, there are lots of individual exceptions. But no one has ever done a study about voting intention without ascertaining that the biggest determining factor is your income and your wealth. — Ken Livingstone

There is now a desperate need for a London-wide left caucus of those interested in the GLC and local councils so that we can compare and discuss what is happening in each borough. — Ken Livingstone