Aneurin Bevan quotes

Aneurin Bevan was a British politician and a leading figure in the Labour Party, best known as the architect of the National Health Service (NHS). His vision transformed healthcare in the UK by making medical services free at the point of use. He is remembered as a passionate advocate for social justice and public welfare. Here are 78 of his quotes:

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction. (Aneurin Bevan)
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
This island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish in Great Britain at the same time. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the 'greatest good for the greatest number' can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
I know that the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation. If he sees suffering, privation or injustice he must not allow it to move him, for that would be evidence of the lack of proper education or of absence of self-control. He must speak in calm and objective accents and talk about a dying child in the same way as he would about the pieces inside an internal combustion engine. (Aneurin Bevan)
I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
The language of priorities is the religion of socialism. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
There can be no immaculate conception of socialism. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
There is only one hope for mankind - and that is democratic Socialism. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
Damn it all, you can't have the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
Economics, said Mr Stanley, is 50% psychology ... What we need, apparently, is not statesman but hypnotists, not scientists, but witchdoctors, not confidence born of scientific prediction of the future, but confidence created by a political Confidence Trick. There is nothing surprising in this. It is the kind of mystic Mumbo-Jumbo to which capitalism is driven when austere reason pronounces sentence of death upon it. It is the primitive recoil from reality and the burdens of reality which lies at the root of Fascist psychology. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
The great Powers of the world today as they look at the armaments they have built up, find themselves hopelessly frustrated. If that be the case, what is the use of speaking about first-class, second-class and third-class Powers? That is surely the wrong language to use. It does not comply with contemporary reality. What we have to seek is new ways of being great, new modes of pioneering, new fashions of thought, new means of inspiring and igniting the minds of mankind. We can do so. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
This is my truth, tell me yours. (Aneurin Bevan)
Politics is a blood sport. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
Reactionary: a man walking backwards with his face to the future. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically. View quote
Aneurin Bevan
Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born. View quote
Aneurin Bevan