Michael Foot quotes

Michael Foot was a British politician and writer, known for leading the Labour Party in the early 1980s. A passionate orator and advocate for social justice, he played a key role in left-wing politics. He remained influential as a critic of nuclear weapons and a supporter of progressive causes. Here are 63 of his quotes:

Men of power have not time to read; yet men who do not read are unfit for power.

Michael Foot

She has no imagination and that means no compassion.

Michael Foot

How long will it be before the cry goes up: "Let's kill all the judges?"

Michael Foot

Most liberties have been won by people who broke the law.

Michael Foot

[There are] judges who stretch the law...to suit reactionary attitudes.

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.

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.

Michael Foot

I certainly think that a Labour Government will have to have effective powers to control the outflow of capital.

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.

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?

Michael Foot

Think of it! A second Chamber selected by the Whips. A seraglio of eunuchs.

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.

Michael Foot

People must learn more and more that the strength of this country is the democratic power of the trade union movement.

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.

Michael Foot

The only man I knew who could make a curse sound like a caress.

Michael Foot

Socialism without public ownership is nothing but a fantastic apology.

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.

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.

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.

Michael Foot

We are in for fierce and angry times in this country.

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.

Michael Foot

A Royal Commission is a broody hen sitting on a china egg.

Michael Foot