Top 80 Tony Benn Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I have had the advantage of a radical Christian upbringing.”

— Tony Benn

52. “Through me the energy policy of the whole Common Market is being held up. Without opening old wounds, it pleases me no end.”

— Tony Benn

53. “The thought that my mother would suddenly be a foreigner would upset me very much.”

— Tony Benn

54. “An MP is the only job where you have 70,000 employers, and only one employee.”

— Tony Benn

55. “I try to operate on two unconnected levels. One on the practical level of action in which I am extremely cautious and conservative. The second is the realm of ideas where I try to be very free.”

— Tony Benn

56. “The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin’s Russia: it’s like blaming Jesus Christ for the Inquisition in Spain.”

— Tony Benn

57. “I see myself as an old man and an unqualified teacher to the nation. I think being a teacher is probably the most important thing you can be in politics.”

— Tony Benn

58. “Some of the jam we thought was for tomorrow, we’ve already eaten.”

— Tony Benn

59. “The flag of radicalism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen.”

— Tony Benn

60. “I’ve got four lovely children, ten lovely grandchildren, and I left parliament to devote more time to politics, and I think that what is really going on in Britain is a growing sense of alienation. People don’t feel anyone listens to them.”

— Tony Benn

61. “The exhaustion of old age is something people who are younger don’t fully appreciate.”

— Tony Benn

62. “It is tempting to deny, but if you deny you confirm what you won’t deny.”

— Tony Benn

63. “I am a public library.”

— Tony Benn

64. “By the end of his sixteen-course meal in Buckingham Palace, Ramsay McDonald discovered he had changed his mind about the workers owning the means of production. From now on, he felt it better that the Dukes and Duchesses should continue to own the means of production. The workers would just have to make do with what was left over.”

— Tony Benn

65. “There is good and bad in all of us and the Church uses the idea of original sin to control us by saying that, if we do not obey the bishops, we will rot in Hell.”

— Tony Benn

66. “Someone comes every morning at nine o’clock to see if I am still alive. I do get lonely, yes, but I have the children who come and see me. I see all my children every week, and there are the grandchildren, too.”

— Tony Benn

67. “The Prime Minister keeps me on around here because I make him look good.”

— Tony Benn

68. “I’d rather die on my feet making a speech than die of Alzheimer’s – and that’s what I’m planning to do.”

— Tony Benn

69. “The 1973 Labour Conference will have before it the most radical programme the Party has prepared since 1945.”

— Tony Benn

70. “Clement Attlee, who looked like a sadistic sanitary inspector...”

— Tony Benn

71. “In the end, the tragedy of Harold Wilson was that you couldn’t believe a word he said.”

— Tony Benn

72. “If ever I left the House of Commons it would be because I wanted to spend more time on politics.”

— Tony Benn

73. “The people who have sacrificed their view in order to get to the top have very often left no footprints in the sands of time.”

— Tony Benn

74. “People say that if we work for the Single European Act, women will get their rights, the water will be purer, and training will be better. That is rubbish. It is part of the attempt to consolidate the EEC.”

— Tony Benn

75. “Although socialism is widely held by the establishment to be outdated, the things that are most popular in British society today are little pockets of socialism, where areas of life have been excluded from the crude operation of market forces and are protected for the benefit of the community.”

— Tony Benn

76. “Britain’s continuing membership of the Community would mean the end of Britain as a completely self-governing nation.”

— Tony Benn

77. “I don’t make mistakes. I make predictions which immediately turn out to be wrong.”

— Tony Benn

78. “I think the truth is that the Labour Party isn’t believed any more because people suspect it will say anything to get votes. The rebuilding of some radical alternatives to Thatcherism – and by that I mean all-party Thatcherism – will require us to do some very difficult things.”

— Tony Benn

79. “Having served in eleven Parliaments, it would be difficult to describe this as a maiden speech. It would be like Elizabeth Taylor appearing at her next wedding in a white gown.”

— Tony Benn

80. “Through talk, we tamed kings, restrained tyrants, averted revolution.”

— Tony Benn

81. “I was stunned with outrage.”

— Tony Benn

82. “It is obvious I shall have to abandon my hopes of getting the Queen’s head off the stamps.”

— Tony Benn

83. “Making mistakes is how you learn.”

— Tony Benn

84. “The present combination of corporate or commercial control theoretically answerable to politically appointed Boards of Governors is not in any sense a democratic enough procedure to control the power the broadcasters have.”

— Tony Benn

85. “Undoubtedly the war with Iraq was a tragedy. I think it was also a crime.”

— Tony Benn

86. “I believe the more difficult the circumstances, the more people will be inclined to trust those in charge at the moment.”

— Tony Benn

87. “When we have a majority we will do it. I think the days of the Lords are quite genuinely numbered.”

— Tony Benn

88. “I don’t want to commit myself in advocating a definite republican constitution which will get bogged down with the question of who would elect the President and when.”

— Tony Benn

89. “Of course, Mao made his mistakes, because everybody does, but at least he allowed working people to smoke, even in the most trying circumstances, such as when, for one reason or another, they found themselves up before the firing squad.”

— Tony Benn