Michael Foot quotes

He's passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever. (Michael Foot)
Men of power have not time to read; yet men who do not read are unfit for power. View quote
Michael Foot
She has no imagination and that means no compassion. View quote
Michael Foot
How long will it be before the cry goes up: "Let's kill all the judges?" View quote
Michael Foot
Most liberties have been won by people who broke the law. View quote
Michael Foot
[There are] judges who stretch the law...to suit reactionary attitudes. View quote
Michael Foot
It does so happen to be the case that if the freedom of the people of this country-and especially the rights of trade unionists-if those precious things in the past had been left to the good sense and fairmindedness of judges, we would have precious few freedoms in this country. View quote
Michael Foot
The national strike of the miners in 1972 performed, I believe, a great service, not only to the miners, but the people in Britain today who wanted coal. View quote
Michael Foot
I certainly think that a Labour Government will have to have effective powers to control the outflow of capital. View quote
Michael Foot
The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time under the bed looking for communists that they haven't had the time to look in the bed. View quote
Michael Foot
No rising hope on the political scene who offered his services to Labour when I happened to be its leader can be dismissed as an opportunist. (Michael Foot)
Is the Labour Party to remain a democratic party in which the right of free criticism and free debate is not merely tolerated but encouraged? Or are the rank and file of the party to be bludgeoned or cowed into an uncritical subservience towards the leadership? View quote
Michael Foot
Think of it! A second Chamber selected by the Whips. A seraglio of eunuchs. View quote
Michael Foot
A Britain which denounced the insanity of the nuclear strategy would be in a position to direct its influence at the United Nations and in the world at large, in a manner at present denied us. View quote
Michael Foot
People must learn more and more that the strength of this country is the democratic power of the trade union movement. View quote
Michael Foot
In my opinion, Marxism is a great creed of human liberation. It is the creed which says that when all other empires fade and vanish, our business is to enlarge the empire of the human mind. View quote
Michael Foot
The only man I knew who could make a curse sound like a caress. View quote
Michael Foot
Socialism without public ownership is nothing but a fantastic apology. View quote
Michael Foot
Of all the sights and sounds which attracted me on my first arrival to live in London in the mid-thirties, one combined operation left a lingering, individual spell. I naturally went to Hyde Park to hear the orators, the best of the many free entertainments on offer in the capital. I heard the purest milk of the world flowing, then as now, from the platform of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. View quote
Michael Foot
Disraeli was my favourite Tory. He was an adventurer pure and simple, or impure and complex. I'm glad to say Gladstone got the better of him. View quote
Michael Foot
There is nothing wrong with being a Marxist. Their point of view is essential to a democratic debate. (Michael Foot)
I've been on the left of the Party since I joined it about 1934 and I haven't seen much reason for altering...I have always been a strong libertarian both inside the Labour Party and outside...what I want to seek to do over a period of course is to establish a Socialist society. View quote
Michael Foot
We are in for fierce and angry times in this country. View quote
Michael Foot
What is needed is a strong shift leftwards. This party in Parliament ought to start the process, and if it won't, the party conference will do it for them. View quote
Michael Foot
A Royal Commission is a broody hen sitting on a china egg. View quote
Michael Foot