Neil Kinnock Quotes
-
We believe there should be reforms in the EEC which would benefit all the members. If these were not achieved, our policy is to preserve the ultimate option of withdrawing Britain. That option would not, this time, need a referendum, as it did before.
-
I'm the guy everybody wanted to live next door. They just didn't want me to be prime minister.
-
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.
-
Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.
-
No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.
-
What has happened is that there are people who, for reasons best known to themselves, have voted for maintaining division in our country.
-
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.
-
I would die for my country but I could never let my country die for me.
-
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.
-
Heckler: At least Mrs Thatcher has got guts.Neil Kinnock: It's a pity that other people had to leave theirs on the ground at Goose Green to prove it.
-
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.
-
Newspapers are tutors as well as informers.
-
I didn't call for a ballot at the start of the miners' strike in 1984. I'll regret that until my dying day.
-
The unforgivable political sin is vanity; the killer diet is sour grapes.
-
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.
-
We support the efforts to keep the pits open until exhausted.
-
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.
-
In the U.K. the far Right is a stain on society and there is a cultural resistance to it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Oh I detest him. I did then, I do now, and it's mutual. He hates me as well. And I'd much prefer to have his savage hatred than even the merest hint of friendship from that man.
-
The enemy of idealism is zealotry.
-
The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.
-
Never mistake the enthusiasm of the minority for the support of the majority.