Top 90 Ken Livingstone Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I do explicitly see Jewish people as a people – not either a religion or an ethnicity but a people.”

— Ken Livingstone

52. “I have no interest in managing my financial affairs.”

— Ken Livingstone

53. “Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz.”

— Ken Livingstone

54. “Anybody who enjoys being in the House of Commons probably needs psychiatric help.”

— Ken Livingstone

55. “I’m never going to take the view that I should say whatever I need to say in order to achieve something. Because that implies a level of dishonesty.”

— Ken Livingstone

56. “You can’t expect to work for the Daily Mail group and have the rest of society treat with you respect as a useful member of society, because you are not.”

— Ken Livingstone

57. “If I was courting the Muslim vote, I wouldn’t have put establishing the partnership ceremony at the forefront of my first term, would I? I go all around London advocating lesbian and gay rights.”

— Ken Livingstone

58. “Politics is not a game. Thousands of people’s jobs and services depended on what the GLC did, and they expected us to do the best we could.”

— Ken Livingstone

59. “I fear that within 10 years gays, trade union activists and left wing politicians will be led off to the gas chambers.”

— Ken Livingstone

60. “I grew up in Lambeth, I went to normal schools and I’ve grown up in a city where people say what they think.”

— Ken Livingstone

61. “The truth is, no one pays more tax than they have to.”

— Ken Livingstone

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

— Ken Livingstone

63. “I employed my wife for three years to sit in the attic and type up my autobiography, 700 pages, organise everywhere I go. I’m paying the normal rate of tax on the money I take out for myself.”

— Ken Livingstone

64. “I think I have gone through my entire public career never telling a lie. I have made mistakes but I never knowingly lied.”

— Ken Livingstone

65. “I don’t just denounce suicide bombers. I denounce those governments which use indiscriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy.”

— Ken Livingstone

66. “If women had never been given the right to vote, then Labour would have won every election after the war.”

— Ken Livingstone

67. “Ed Miliband doesn’t give a damn about what he looks like, how he dresses. He came into politics to change society.”

— Ken Livingstone

68. “If I blew my nose the Daily Express and the Daily Mail would say that I am trying to spread germ warfare.”

— Ken Livingstone

69. “The American agenda is sweeping everything before it, and although it’s not perfect, the EU is better on environmental issues. It’s a less rapacious form of capitalism.”

— Ken Livingstone

70. “Yes, there are lots of individual exceptions. But no one has ever done a study about voting intention without ascertaining that the biggest determining factor is your income and your wealth.”

— Ken Livingstone

71. “I am not against Israel, I am against Zionists.”

— Ken Livingstone

72. “I never came into life with any favours or privileges.”

— Ken Livingstone

73. “If transport, housing and Olympic projects do not work, I will crawl away under a stone.”

— Ken Livingstone

74. “All the politics of the post-war period was about the clash between the Soviet Union and America, and virtually all issues ended up being subordinated to that. Now, the question is, what is the most a socialist can achieve in a global economy?”

— Ken Livingstone

75. “The market is a brilliant system for the exchange of goods and services, but it doesn’t protect the environment unless it’s regulated, it doesn’t train your workforce unless it’s regulated, and it doesn’t give you the long-term investment you want.”

— Ken Livingstone

76. “When I was leader of the GLC, by the time I had been in control for three years, the difference in pay between the cleaner and the director general was a four-to-one ratio. I find that attractive.”

— Ken Livingstone

77. “The people I really most admire are Robert Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. If you know someone, it is very hard to revere them.”

— Ken Livingstone

78. “I’ve never declined to do an interview.”

— Ken Livingstone

79. “It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself, we want a statue to look like the person.”

— Ken Livingstone

80. “My view is rather than just rage at your impotence you find the best way of achieving as much as you can within whatever constraints there are. It’s not the world I would have created but you do what you can within it.”

— Ken Livingstone

81. “Polling in a general election is pretty accurate, because turnout is usually high.”

— Ken Livingstone

82. “You lose power in Britain and you are just Joe Public again.”

— Ken Livingstone

83. “I refuse not to have a sense of humour.”

— Ken Livingstone

84. “I undertake that, in the exercise of my functions of that office I will have regard to any guidance with respect to ethical standards issued by the secretary of state under Section 66 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999.”

— Ken Livingstone

85. “I have met the people who run the world, and I am not in awe of them.”

— Ken Livingstone

86. “I can easily lose myself emotionally in absolute Hollywood garbage.”

— Ken Livingstone

87. “I think democracy’s undermined when those who own newspapers fill them with trivia rather than real issues.”

— Ken Livingstone

88. “I’m more interested in politicians who deal with human rights in their own country rather than lecture the rest of the world.”

— Ken Livingstone

89. “Every budget I have ever prepared has been balanced.”

— Ken Livingstone

90. “I think it’s much more important to keep people in work than have pay rises.”

— Ken Livingstone

91. “Just because I am critical of the coalition doesn’t mean I am anti-English. I am just anti-scumbags.”

— Ken Livingstone

92. “Global warming could be solved by shifting three to four per cent of global GDP to pay for it.”

— Ken Livingstone

93. “I have opened newspapers and read incredible lies.”

— Ken Livingstone