Neil Kinnock Quotes & Sayings

You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits. — Neil Kinnock

The enemy of idealism is zealotry. — Neil Kinnock

I'm the guy everybody wanted to live next door. They just didn't want me to be prime minister. — Neil Kinnock

Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry. — Neil Kinnock

I want to retire at 50. I want to play cricket in the summer and geriatric football in the winter, and sing in the choir. — Neil Kinnock

I must emphasise that there is nothing in the Labour Party constituion that could, or should prevent people from holding opinions which favour Leninist-Trotskyism. Certainly Marxism has, and will continue to have an important function in the Labour Party. — Neil Kinnock

Is Tony Blair of the Labour party? The answer to that is profoundly 'yes', but that is not how, sentimentally, he is regarded in the Labour movement generally. — Neil Kinnock

They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow. — Neil Kinnock

The trouble with the Socialist Workers Party is that they live in an historical thermos-flask. — Neil Kinnock

Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards. — Neil Kinnock

Without false modetsy, I don't think I have a fraction of the talent of either Bevan of Foot. — Neil Kinnock

We cannot remove the evils of capitalism without taking its source of power: ownership. — Neil Kinnock

I would die for my country but I could never let my country die for me. — Neil Kinnock

Someone up there likes me. — Neil Kinnock

American nuclear weapons would almost certainly start being removed from Britain within 12 months of a Labour government gaining power. — Neil Kinnock

I'm prepared to take advice on leisure from Prince Philip. He's a world expert on leisure. He's been practicing it for most of his adult life. — Neil Kinnock

Newspapers are tutors as well as informers. — Neil Kinnock

Resentment is an extremely bitter diet, I have no desire to make my own toxins. — Neil Kinnock

Mobile phones are the only subject on which men boast about who's got the smallest. — Neil Kinnock

[Marx's theories] gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did. — Neil Kinnock

People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby. — Neil Kinnock

If we are going to have a bicameral parliament, I think there should always be a reserved place for people whose background and experience are critical to the welfare of the nation. — Neil Kinnock

There are politicians who seethe with ambition all the time, and there are a lot of other politicians who don't. I'm in the second category, that's all. — Neil Kinnock

At various times in the next 20 or 30 years I think it reasonable to anticipate that I will be among the leadershp of the Labour Party, but as far as being leader, I can't see it happening, and I'm not particularly keen on it happening. — Neil Kinnock

In the U.K. the far Right is a stain on society and there is a cultural resistance to it. — Neil Kinnock

The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing. — Neil Kinnock

We must not look for some kind of Messiah. — Neil Kinnock

I am the first male member of my family for about three generations who can have reasonable confidence in expecting that I will leave this earth with more or less the same number of fingers, hands, legs, toes and eyes as I had when I was born. — Neil Kinnock

I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old. — Neil Kinnock

People, even independently minded people, do to an extent draw their impressions from what they are told, especially if they are told it incessantly by newspapers. — Neil Kinnock

Arthur Scargill is the Labour movements nearest equivalent to a First World War General. — Neil Kinnock

The unforgivable political sin is vanity; the killer diet is sour grapes. — Neil Kinnock

Compassion is not a sloppy sentimental feeling for people who are underprivileged or sick ... it is an absolutely practical belief that regardless of a person's background, ability or ability to pay, he should be provided with the best that society has to offer. — Neil Kinnock

I didn't call for a ballot at the start of the miners' strike in 1984. I'll regret that until my dying day. — Neil Kinnock

No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons. — Neil Kinnock

Margaret Thatcher was not a malicious person. She was a person who couldn't see, or didn't want to see, the unfairness and disadvantaging consequences of the application of what she thought to be a renewing ideology. — Neil Kinnock

Those who have the immense dishonesty to fight with a ballot box in one hand and a rifle in the other have no place in democratic politics. — Neil Kinnock

Political renegades always start their career of treachery as 'the best men of all parties' and end up in the Tory knackery. — Neil Kinnock

Harold Wilson is a petty bourgeois and will remain so in spirit even if they make him a Viscount. — Neil Kinnock

I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old. — Neil Kinnock

I take notice of those who have argued consistently for the modernisation of the E.U., but so many of the skeptics in Britain are just hostile to the whole European idea. — Neil Kinnock

I?m not even sure I?d go into a reformed House of Lords. But let?s put it like this, the decision would have been easier had there been not even complete reform but a substantial stride. — Neil Kinnock

I'd like to be remembered as somebody who tried to promote justice. — Neil Kinnock

The House of Lords must go - not be reformed, not be replaced, not be reborn in some nominated life-after-death patronage paradise, just closed down, abolished, finished. — Neil Kinnock

Devolutionary reform will not provide a factory, a machine or jobs, build a school, train a doctor or put a pound on pensions. — Neil Kinnock

My first real experience of ambition was as party leader. It was my ambition for Labour to win, in which event I would be prime minister. — Neil Kinnock

Two negatives don't make a positive, any more than two half-wits make a wit. — Neil Kinnock

That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion. — Neil Kinnock