Direction of travel

This page is a repository for my favourite quotations. Please don’t cite me as an accurate source, though.

“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”
-JS Mill

“In recent years to be on the ‘left’ has come to signal an intention to be more thorough than the ‘right’ in carrying out the agenda of the right”
-Zygmunt Bauman

“Freedom for the pike is death to the minnows”
-R.H. Tawney

“I want to be on the left wing of the possible”
-Michael Harrington

“Effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction”
-John F. Kennedy

“Politics has been based for so long on the idea that this is a fundamentally conservative country. I don’t believe that’s true, and I want to prove it.”
-Jon Cruddas

“If there is a class war—and there is— it is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones.”
-Maurice Cowling, historian and Conservative

“If the world changes, and we don’t, then we become of no use to the world. Our principles cease being principles and just ossify into dogma.”
-Tony Blair

“Unity of Labor is the Hope of the World”
-Motto of the Australian Labor Party

“The more he speaks the less he says!”
-Gordon Brown (on David Cameron)

“The biggest risk for Britain is a decade of austerity – of limited growth, limited employment and limited opportunity.”
-Gordon Brown

‎”Markets are tools to support society and its goals.”
-Paul Krugman

“To claim for socialism that it is a class war is to do it an injustice and indefinitely postpone its triumph. Socialism offers a platform broad enough for all to stand upon. It makes war upon a system, not upon a class.”

“progress is not the elimination of struggle, but rather a change in its terms”

-Nye Bevan
“Every means tends to become and end”
-Ignazio Silone

“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory”
-Friedrich Engels

“I reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals”
-Barack Obama

“Our electors live in a defiantly individualist society which respects honesty, self-expression and originality. They simply cannot comprehend why politicians repeat the central line rather than speak their own minds.”
-Robin Cook

“I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
-James Madison

“I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.”
-Robert F. Kennedy

“We need an economy for people. Not people for an economy.”
-Labour blogger Miljenko Williams

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
-Abraham Lincoln

“The free development of each… is the condition for the free development of all”

“Democracy is the road to socialism.”

“The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas… The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production”
- Marx & Engels

“burning is not answering”
-Jean-Jaques Rousseau

“Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance.”
-G.K. Chesterton

“A consensus politician is someone who does something that he doesn’t believe is right because it keeps people quiet when he does it.”
-John Major

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
-Winston Churchill

“In politics, guts is all.”
-Barbara Castle

- – -

“Then you realise that you got to have a purpose
Or this place is gonna knock you out sooner or later”
-The Clash

“Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.”
-Voltaire

“With confidence, you have won before you have started.”
-Marcus Garvey

“When love is not madness, it is not love”
-Pedro Calderon de la Barca