Top 90 Ken Livingstone Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Consultation is a good thing when people agree with you, and a waste of time when people don’t agree with you.”

— Ken Livingstone

2. “Everyone changes all the time.”

— Ken Livingstone

3. “I am a socialist, a believer in rational thought and the rule of law.”

— Ken Livingstone

4. “The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations.”

— Ken Livingstone

5. “To tackle climate change you don’t have to reduce your quality of life, but you do have to change the way you live.”

— Ken Livingstone

6. “One thing that Chairman Mao did was to end the appalling foot binding of women. That alone justifies the Mao Tse-tung era.”

— Ken Livingstone

7. “Well, on lots of small things we could have done better, but on all the big things we called it right. You should make less mistakes as you get older, and I became a councillor back in 1971, so if by this stage in politics I’m making lots of big mistakes, then I shouldn’t be here.”

— Ken Livingstone

8. “Everyone is bisexual. Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything.”

— Ken Livingstone

9. “We look to the left and to the right And we need help but nobody’s in sight Where is the man that we all need Tell him he’s to come and rescue me.”

— Ken Livingstone

10. “I liked it when we had ugly politicians who droned on about issues.”

— Ken Livingstone

11. “World wide capitalism kills more people everyday then Hitler did. And he was crazy.”

— Ken Livingstone

12. “Every year the international finance system kills more people than the Second World War. But at least Hitler was mad, you know.”

— Ken Livingstone

13. “I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself – the working-class tradition of self-education.”

— Ken Livingstone

14. “There needs to be radical development in equality law to create the environment to allow women to stay in work.”

— Ken Livingstone

15. “I’ve met serial killers and professional assassins and nobody scared me as much as MrsT.”

— Ken Livingstone

16. “The British judiciary is one of the most corrupt in the world because of politically active judges.”

— Ken Livingstone

17. “If Voting Changed Anything They’d Abolish It.”

— Ken Livingstone

18. “What defines someone’s music taste is their teens and early 20s. It’s that combination of your sexual awakening and the music of the time, it fixes you forever.”

— Ken Livingstone

19. “I’d love to write about my growing sexual awareness, but the press would turn it into something squalid.”

— Ken Livingstone

20. “I was a weedy kid, not like one of those working-class men who can accommodate not being academically clever by physical strength and prowess.”

— Ken Livingstone

21. “I’ve always been a workaholic. I reckon, on average, I’ve had less than one day a year off in my working career.”

— Ken Livingstone

22. “If you are running a city you must focus on day-to-day problems.”

— Ken Livingstone

23. “I Kenneth Robert Livingstone, having been elected to the office of mayor of London, declare that I take that office upon myself, and will duly and faithfully fulfil the duties of it to the best of my judgement and ability.”

— Ken Livingstone

24. “I can only admire people who I have never met and are dead – because you know so much about anyone who is alive.”

— Ken Livingstone

25. “I just long for the day when I wake up and find that the Saudi royal family are swinging from lamp-posts.”

— Ken Livingstone

26. “I have only ever borrowed money for investment. I have been sound money all my life.”

— Ken Livingstone

27. “When you get into politics, you find that all your worst nightmares about it turn out to be true, and the people who are attracted to large concentrations of power are precisely the ones who should be kept as far away from it as possible.”

— Ken Livingstone

28. “Only some ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster.”

— Ken Livingstone

29. “I swim three times a week.”

— Ken Livingstone

30. “I take a much more pragmatic view than many people on the Left about working with Neil Kinnock. Kinnock represents the best vehicle possible for achieving socialism now.”

— Ken Livingstone

31. “I’ve always told the truth. I’ve often been wrong – but I’ve never knowingly lied. Not in public life. Because I don’t see the need to.”

— Ken Livingstone

32. “I’m in exactly the same position as everybody else who has a small business.”

— Ken Livingstone

33. “The idea that the GLC should be abolished at a stroke is ill though out, undemocratic and will cost the people of London dear.”

— Ken Livingstone

34. “The problem is that many MPs never see the London that exists beyond the wine bars and brothels of Westminster.”

— Ken Livingstone

35. “I would like to sound like James Mason. I reckon if I’d had a better voice I could have been prime minister. It is the most irritating voice in public life.”

— Ken Livingstone

36. “I think George Bush is the most corrupt American president since Harding in the Twenties. He is not the legitimate president. This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown.”

— Ken Livingstone

37. “I feel like Galileo going before the Inquisition to explain that the Sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth. I hope I have more success.”

— Ken Livingstone

38. “I’ve got people handling the media. I employ at the moment two people. No-one is paying income tax on the money they use to employ people.”

— Ken Livingstone

39. “There is now a desperate need for a London-wide left caucus of those interested in the GLC and local councils so that we can compare and discuss what is happening in each borough.”

— Ken Livingstone

40. “What do we do about climate change bearing down upon us?”

— Ken Livingstone

41. “Give me the whole world to run and then I’ll be happy. If tomorrow I was told I had to sort out the whole world’s problems I’d sleep like a baby.”

— Ken Livingstone

42. “I don’t work hard enough. If I had worked harder I might have been prime minister.”

— Ken Livingstone

43. “I feel a degree of regret that Marshall did not push on and say ‘abolish the GLC’ because I think it would have been a major saving and would have released massive resources for productive use.”

— Ken Livingstone

44. “I loathe and detest all this trivialisation of politics.”

— Ken Livingstone

45. “My administration will tackle these issues in consultation with the black communities of London.”

— Ken Livingstone

46. “When you see someone trying to manoeuvre it round the school gates you have to think, you are a complete idiot.”

— Ken Livingstone

47. “To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews.”

— Ken Livingstone

48. “I grew up in a house with very few books.”

— Ken Livingstone

49. “I mean I get loads of money, all from different sources. You give it to your accountant. They manage it. But you pay corporation tax. If you’re then taking it out and spending it on yourself, you have to pay more.”

— Ken Livingstone

50. “I go all around London advocating lesbian and gay rights.”

— Ken Livingstone